Mike and I went for a short trip this month. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Realtor Building in downtown Chicago is going to be torn down and redeveloped. That building also has the Billy Goat Tavern in lower Wacker Drive – a classic place – difficult to find, but a unique Chicago bar.
So we decided to go down for lunch again on a Saturday afternoon to the original Cheeseborger, Cheeseborger location. I will say the food hasn’t changed one bit. What amazed me was the waves of people coming in – a lot of families with small kids (more than I expected).
People were taking pictures everywhere.
We sat at the bar and looked at some of the names on the wall – Irv Kupcinet, Mike Royko, Tim Weigel, Roger Ebert and John Kass, to name a few. There were bottles of liquor at the bar that looked older that I am! But it still was a neat place to go to. You still can feel the atmosphere where writers would drink and smoke and solve the world’s problem at the bar.
We know that they are talking about moving the Billy Goat to another location, but they won’t be able to keep the same feel of the place – so you may want to make a trip downtown to revisit the original.
The only problem is those darned parking meter boxes – one of the worst decisions Mayor Daley made.
We were lucky to find a parking spot on the street, so we ended up paying $8 to go to get a $6 cheeseburger. That’s downtown Chicago! We then went by the lakefront – Mike got some great pictures of the lake – but he almost froze getting the pictures. I guarded the car to stay warm!
