 kcazzieOne Of Jerry's KidsPremium
join:2000-08-13
Morton Grove, IL | reply to VegasMan
Re: Wrigley Parking on off days I grew up on Oakdale and B-Way (blk north of surf)... Great area when your young, or just young at heart... It always had a gay population and they were cool... It was the A- holes who came down to kick some ass and a few times got there asses kicked... That area had a couple famous places... A bar called Thumbs UP and Bensingers Pool Hall
* found this in google -
Back in the70's there was a place called " Thumbs Up " on north Broadway. I had a real good time there one night. Long gone ...Actually by the 70's it was gone, more like the 60's... Best live music bar in the city at that time...and Bensingers Pool Hall right next to it... Bensingers used to be downtown and was suppose to be pool hall for The Hustler with Paul Newman (In the early 1930s, green felt goliath Willie Mosconi could outdraw the Bears, and, from 1948 to 1951, he defended the world championship in a specially-constructed arena on Navy Pier. And, for years, we had Bensinger's, which may have been the best-known billiard parlor in the country. Recollected by Mosconi, in the book "Willie's Game," "It was a magnificent place, with velvet curtains and original oil paintings on the walls. An open, wrought-iron cage elevator took you up to the second floor where the tournament games were held. At night, you were surrounded by the glow of neon lights from Chicago's Loop until the games were ready to begin." And he didn't even mention that Bensinger's had a third story; one each for pool, billiards and snooker. This pool paradise, on Randolph opposite the Oriental Theatre, closed in 1960. A smaller, scaled-back Bensinger's survived the sixties in a rundown basement at Clark and Diversey, but in the early 1970s relocated again, to a second-story room nearby on Broadway. It closed for good less than two years later. To a great extent, pool in Chicago has followed national trends. By some estimates, skewed by boosterism and the inherent difficulties of counting pool sharks, in the 1920s, twenty-two million people played the sport. During the Depression, pool was hit hard, as all sports were, but failed to rebound afterward, with player numbers dropping to three million by the late 1950s. In the 1960s, the phenomenal success of the movie "The Hustler" sparked a resurgence; in 1962, one year after the movie's release, seventeen million players again enjoyed the sport.) |
