Behind the butcher counter of a century-old former auto body shop, the 1st Ward is a 5,000-square-foot concert and event space tucked inside the Chop Shop complex at 2033 West North Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park neighbourhood. The building sits just west of the Milwaukee-Damen-North intersection, one of the city's busiest nightlife crossroads, and brings together encased meats, craft beer, cocktails, and live entertainment under a single roof. Designed by event professionals, the venue holds .....

A parish built it; Chicago theatre never gave it back. The Athenaeum at 2936 North Southport Avenue in Lakeview opened in 1911, designed by architect Hermann J. Gaul for the Redemptorist Fathers of St. Alphonsus as a home for the intellectual, physical and social intercourse of their German-Catholic parishioners - opera, dance, orchestral and dramatic productions from day one. More than a century later it is Chicago's oldest continuously operating Off-Loop theatre, now run as the Athenaeum Cente.....

An old Polish ballroom turned Latin club now works for everyone on Milwaukee Avenue. Avondale Music Hall at 3336 North Milwaukee Avenue - technically in Irving Park, named in tribute to the neighbourhood next door - is the 350-capacity venue that promoter Chris Bauman built out of Club Mambo, the Latin dance club that held the corner of Milwaukee and Keystone for two decades atop an earlier Polish nightclub history. Bauman, whose portfolio also includes the Patio and Olympic theatres, bought th.....

A travelling exhibition of giant inflatable art set up inside a film studio on the city's Northwest Side, the Balloon Museum's EmotionAir show opened in Chicago in late October 2025 for a run scheduled through early April 2026. The wider Balloon Museum project began in 2021 and has toured cities including London, Paris, Rome, New York and Singapore; this edition, first staged in London in late 2023, frames its inflatable works around the theme of emotion. Rather than a permanent collection, the.....

The butcher shop in the back became one of Chicago's hardest-working stages. Beat Kitchen at 2100 West Belmont Avenue has anchored the Roscoe Village corner of Belmont and Hoyne since 1990, serving live music, food and beer out of an 1889 building whose back room spent its first century as the neighbourhood butcher's before conversion into the venue's music room. Owner Robert Gomez - whose portfolio also includes Wicker Park's Subterranean - has kept the formula steady for three decades: a prope.....

Chicago's transit authority demolished this club, and it came back bigger. Bottom Lounge began life in 1991 as Lakeview Links, a sports bar with cover bands at 3206 North Wilton in Lake View; when owners learned around 2001 that the CTA had targeted the property under eminent domain for the Brown Line extension, they adopted the Bottom Lounge name and started booking original music as a supposed last hurrah. The reprieve lasted years - four consecutive New Year's Eves were billed as the final ni.....

Standing at the southern edge of Lincoln Park, where Clark Street meets North Avenue, the Chicago History Museum holds the collections of the Chicago Historical Society, an institution founded in 1856 and among the oldest cultural organisations in the city. Its early collections were twice devastated by fire, including the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the society rebuilt each time before moving to its present Georgian-style building, which opened in 1932. The museum took its current public n.....

A century-old Wicker Park auto body garage now butchers whole animals in the front and books indie tours in the back. Chop Shop at 2033 West North Avenue opened in October 2013 as Chicago's only sustainable butcher, deli, restaurant and bar attached to a full concert venue - the two-story building, vacant for years, was bought in August 2011 by investor Nick Moretti, who brought in Mario Minelli of Minelli Meats to run the food side and Matt Woodburn to book and manage the performance space. The.....

Chicago's first fully operational winery opened not in wine country but in a former food-distribution warehouse on Randolph Street. City Winery Chicago at 1200 West Randolph Street welcomed its first guests in August 2012 - Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped cut the ribbon at the 14 August opening party and comedian Lewis Black broke in the stage with a week of shows, followed within days by two sold-out nights from Lindsey Buckingham. It was the first expansion of Michael Dorf's Manhattan original, and .....

An illuminated red-and-black serpent marks one of the few signs of life on a gritty stretch of Ashland Avenue, and behind it sits Chicago's punk rock living room. Cobra Lounge at 235 North Ashland Avenue opened on 17 March 2006 in the shell of the old G and Z Restaurant and Bar, a long-standing workingman's taproom on the near west side, and grew under the late Sean McKeough - the Riot Fest co-founder whose fingerprints are all over Chicago's independent music infrastructure - into a bar, restau.....