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.....

Chicago's freethinker cemetery became its most transfixing concert ground. Bohemian National Cemetery at 5255 North Pulaski Road was founded in 1877 by the city's Czech community after a Catholic priest refused burial to Marie Silhanek, a Czech woman deemed insufficiently observant - an outrage that drove eight Bohemian benevolent societies to buy fifty acres in what was then Jefferson Township and create a burial ground free of religious restrictions, open within a decade to all nationalities a.....

Chicago's last honky-tonk survived the neighbourhood, the taxman and two years of darkness. Carol's Pub at 4923 North Clark Street, at the corner of Clark and Leland in Uptown's Sheridan Park enclave, opened in 1972 as Pam's Playhouse under Ted Harris, an Alabama transplant who knew exactly who his customers were: the huge wave of Appalachian and southern migrants who had turned post-war Uptown into "Hillbilly Heaven," a district of honky-tonks, diners and drag-strip streets. When Ted died in 19.....

A replica of Warsaw's Royal Castle clock tower rises over the Kennedy Expressway, marking the movie palace that became the capitol of Polish Chicago. The Copernicus Center at 5216 West Lawrence Avenue in Jefferson Park opened on 27 June 1930 as the Gateway Theatre, a deluxe Balaban and Katz house designed by Mason Rapp of the great theatre firm Rapp and Rapp - the Chicago Herald-Examiner devoted a full page to proclaiming it the most acoustically perfect theatre in the world, and a week of neigh.....

No seat in the house is more than 45 feet from the stage - not even in the balcony. The Gary and Laura Maurer Concert Hall, at 4544 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago's Lincoln Square, is the flagship performance room of the Old Town School of Folk Music, the storied teaching institution that has anchored the city's folk scene since 1957. The hall occupies the school's Lincoln Square West building, a handsome former public library the Old Town School converted when it moved north from its original.....

Horner Park is a Chicago Park District facility on the northwest side of Chicago, Illinois, featuring athletic fields, playgrounds, and a fieldhouse that hosts community events, outdoor concerts, and neighbourhood festivals.

Six University of Chicago physics students designed the sound system before the first band played a note. Sleeping Village at 3734 West Belmont Avenue opened in early 2018 in Avondale, the second act from the trio behind Logan Square cocktail landmark The Whistler - Billy Helmkamp, Robert Brenner and Eric Henry. The name explains the concept: an unassuming building hiding a multi-part gathering place - a 56-tap bar heavy on local breweries and one of the city's largest cider selections, Dark Ma.....