For the moment, 2 of the NFL's 4 oldest franchises, also 2 of its 3 most successful, are in bad spots. The New York Giants have appeared in 19 NFL Championship Games, 5 of them under the Super Bowl name, and have won 8 NFL Championships. The Chicago Bears have appeared in 13 Championship Games, 2 of them under the Super Bowl name, and have won 9 NFL Championships. (Each team won 1 before there was a Championship Game.)
And no 2 teams have played each other in more NFL Championship Games, 6: The Bears won in 1933, 1941, 1946 and 1963; while the Giants won in 1934 and 1956. Alas, the realignment caused by the 1970 merger of the NFL and the AFL has made a Super Bowl between them impossible.
But now, the Giants are 4-11, while the Bears, even with yesterday's win, are 5-10. Both look like they're going nowhere. Due to injuries, the Giants had to start Jake Fromm at quarterback yesterday. They might have been better off with Jake From State Farm. And Da Bears also have an injury crisis.
These teams play each other this coming Sunday, January 2, 2022, at Soldier Field. I would say, "Something's got to give," but this is the NFL, where a tie is still possible. (Pittsburgh and Detroit played to one earlier this year.)
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
And under his ribs the heart of the people, laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
-- Carl Sandburg, 1916.
Sandburg knew. He was right then. He is still right now. And this legendary poem "Chicago" fits the Bears more than any of the city's other teams.
Before You Go. This game will be played in early January, so you may be thinking that the infamous Chicago cold and wind may come into play, a cold blast of air coming in off Lake Michigan producing "Bear Weather."
The Chicago Tribune is predicting temperatures to be in the low 20s during daylight, and the teens at night. Bundle up. Fortunately, neither rain nor snow is predicted. The Chicago Sun-Times backs up its rivals' temperature predictions, but is more optimistic about the chance of rain.
Chicago is on Central Daylight Time, so move your timepieces back 1 hour.
Tickets. The Bears averaged 61,916 fans per home game in 2019, the last pre-COVID season. That's only 24th out of the NFL's 32 teams, but it's a sellout, because Soldier Field ranks dead last in the NFL in seating capacity. And the Bears -- yes, more than the Cubs, more than the post-Michael Jordan Bulls -- are easily the most popular sports team in Chicago. It's football city 1st, and an anything-else city 2nd.
Tickets in the lower level are $278 on the sidelines, and $150 in the end zone. In the middle level, they're $255 on the sidelines and $140 in the end zone. In the upper deck, they're $105 on the sidelines and $135 in the end zone.
Getting There. Chicago is 792 land miles from New York. And it's 786 miles from MetLife Stadium to Soldier Field. Knowing this, your first reaction is going to be to fly out there.
Ordinarily, this is a comparatively cheap flight. This time, you could get a round-trip nonstop flight for just $279 -- cheaper this time than either the train or the bus. O'Hare International Airport (named for Lt. Cmdr. Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's 1st flying ace who was nevertheless shot down over the Pacific in World War II), at the northwestern edge of the city, is United Airlines' headquarters, so nearly every flight they have from the New York area's airports to there is nonstop, so it'll be 3 hours, tarmac to tarmac, and about 2 hours going back.
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Blue Line train will take you from O'Hare to the downtown elevated (or "L") tracks that run in "The Loop" (the borders of which are Randolph, Wells, Van Buren and Wabash Streets) in 45 minutes. From Midway Airport, the Orange Line train can get you to the Loop. Both should take about 45 minutes.
Bus? Greyhound's run between the 2 cities, launched 5 times per day, is relatively easy, but long, averaging about 18 hours, and is $356 round-trip -- but can drop to as low as $222 on Advanced Purchase. Only 1 of the 5 runs goes straight there without requiring you to change buses: The one leaving Port Authority Bus Terminal at 10:15 PM (Eastern) and arriving at Chicago at 2:30 PM (Central). This includes half-hour rest stops at Milesburg, Pennsylvania and Elkhart, Indiana, and an hour-and-a-half stopover in Cleveland.
The station is at 630 W. Harrison Street at Des Plaines Street. (If you've seen one of my favorite movies, Midnight Run, this is a new station, not the one seen in that 1988 film.) The closest CTA stop is Clinton on the Blue Line, around the corner, underneath the elevated Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway.
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Train? Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited (known as the Twentieth Century Limited when the old New York Central Railroad ran it from Grand Central Terminal to Chicago's LaSalle Street Station) leaves New York's Penn Station at 3:40 every afternoon, and arrives at Union Station at 225 South Canal Street at Adams Street in Chicago at 9:50 every morning. Going back, it leaves at 9:30 every evening and arrives back in New York at 6:42 PM the next day. It's $317 round-trip.
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The closest CTA stop is Quincy/Wells, in the Loop, but that's 6 blocks away – counting the Chicago River as a block; Union Station is, literally, out of the Loop.
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If you do decide to walk from Union Station to the Loop, don't look up at the big black thing you pass. That's the Willis Tower, formerly known as the Sears Tower, which, until the new World Trade Center was topped off, was the tallest building in North America, which it had officially been since it opened in 1974. If there's one thing being in New York should have taught you, it's this: "Don't look up at the tall buildings, or you'll look like a tourist."
But since you've come all this way, it makes sense to get a hotel, so take a cab from Union Station or Greyhound to the hotel – unless you're flying in, in which case you can take the CTA train to within a block of a good hotel. There are also hotels near the airports.
If you decide to drive, it's far enough that it will help to get someone to go with you and split the duties, and to trade off driving and sleeping. The directions are rather simple, down to (quite literally) the last mile. You'll need to get into New Jersey, and take Interstate 80 West. You'll be on I-80 for the vast majority of the trip, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Ohio, in the western suburbs of Cleveland, I-80 will merge with Interstate 90. From this point onward, you won't need to think about I-80 until you head home; I-90 is now the key.
If you were going directly to Soldier Field (not a good idea, as you should go to your hotel first), you'd take Exit 53C (right after passing the White Sox' ballpark on your left), taking Interstate 55 East. Almost immediately, you will turn on U.S. Route 41 North. This is Lake Shore Drive. Turn right on East 18th Drive, between 2 parking lots.
If you do it right, you should spend about an hour and a half in New Jersey, 5 hours and 15 minutes in Pennsylvania, 4 hours in Ohio, 2 hours and 30 minutes in Indiana, and half an hour in Illinois before you reach the exit for your hotel. That's 13 hours and 45 minutes. Counting rest stops, preferably halfway through Pennsylvania and just after you enter both Ohio and Indiana, and accounting for traffic in both New York and Chicago, it should be no more than 18 hours, which would save you time on both Greyhound and Amtrak, if not on flying.
Once In the City. A derivation of a Native American name, "Chikagu" was translated as "Place of the onion," as there were onion fields there before there was a white settlement. Some have suggested the translation is a little off, that it should be "Place of the skunk." Others have said, either way, it means "Place of the big stink."
Founded in 1831, so by Northeastern standards it's a young city, Chicago's long-ago nickname of "the Second City" is no longer true, as its population has dropped, and Los Angeles' has risen, to the point where L.A. has passed it, and Chicago is now the 3rd-largest city in America. But, at 2.7 million within the city limits, and just under 10 million in the metropolitan area, it's still a huge city. And its legendary crime problem is still there, so whatever precautions you take when you're in New York, take them in Chicago as well.
The "Loop" is the connected part of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)'s elevated railway (sometimes written as "El" or "L") downtown: Over Wells Street on the west, Van Buren Street on the south, Wabash Street on the east and State Street on the north. Inside the Loop, the east-west streets are Lake, Randolph, Washington, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson and Van Buren; the north-south streets are Wells, LaSalle (Chicago's "Wall Street"), Clark, Dearborn, State and Wabash.
The city's street-address centerpoint is in the Loop, at State & Madison Streets. Madison separates North from South, while State separates East from West. The street grid is laid out so that every 800 on the house numbers is roughly 1 mile. As Soldier Field is at 1410 Museum Campus Drive, 333 West 35th Street, and on the 300 block of Waldron Drive, now you know it's a little less than half a mile east of State, and a mile and a half south of Madison.
Chicago has 2 "beltways": Interstate 294 forms an inner one, while Interstates 290 and 355 form an outer one. It also has highways named for 3 Presidents, and 1 defeated Presidential nominee from the Chicago area.
I-290 is the Eisenhower Expressway; a run that goes from I-90 to I-94 to I-190 is the Kennedy Expressway; I-88 from the suburbs west to the Mississippi River in Iowa is the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway (it passes his birthplace of Tampico and other towns where he grew up); and the Cook County portion of I-55 is the Stevenson Expressway, named for Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, grandson of Grover Cleveland's 2nd Vice President, Governor of Illinois 1949-53, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's defeated opponent of 1952 and 1956.
The CTA's rapid-rail system is both underground (subway) and above-ground (elevated or "El"), although the El is better-known, standing as a Chicago icon alongside the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, Michael Jordan, deep-dish pizza, and less savory things like municipal corruption, Mrs. O'Leary's cow and Al Capone. The single-ride fare is $2.50 for the El, $2.25 for the bus. A 1-day pass is $5, and a 3-day pass is $15.
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(By the way, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was more likely the result of Mr. O'Leary hosting a poker game in his barn, in which he, or one of his friends, dropped cigar ash onto hay, rather than Mrs. O'Leary's cow, knocking a lantern, onto some hay.)
I was actually in Chicago on the day they switched from tokens to farecards: June 1, 1999. It took me by surprise, as I had saved 10 tokens from my previous visit. I was able to use them all, because I'd gotten there 2 days before.
Illinois' State sales tax is 6.25 percent, but in the City of Chicago it's 9.25 percent -- higher than New York's. So don't be shocked when you see prices: Like New York, Boston and Washington, Chicago is an expensive city.
ZIP Codes in the Chicago area start with the digits 60. The Area Code is 312, with 708 and 847 in the suburbs. Just as New York's electric company is Consolidated Edison, or "Con Ed," Northern Illinois' is Commonwealth Edison, or "ComEd," which confused the heck out of me the 1st time I heard it.
Demographically, Chicago is split almost right down the middle: 35.5 percent black, 33.5 percent white, 23.9 percent Hispanic (as with most Midwestern cities, most of their Hispanics are Mexican rather than Puerto Rican or Cuban), with Asians trailing at 7.0 percent.
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
And under his ribs the heart of the people, laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
-- Carl Sandburg, 1916.
Sandburg knew. He was right then. He is still right now. And this legendary poem "Chicago" fits the Bears more than any of the city's other teams.
Before You Go. This game will be played in early January, so you may be thinking that the infamous Chicago cold and wind may come into play, a cold blast of air coming in off Lake Michigan producing "Bear Weather."
The Chicago Tribune is predicting temperatures to be in the low 20s during daylight, and the teens at night. Bundle up. Fortunately, neither rain nor snow is predicted. The Chicago Sun-Times backs up its rivals' temperature predictions, but is more optimistic about the chance of rain.
Chicago is on Central Daylight Time, so move your timepieces back 1 hour.
Tickets. The Bears averaged 61,916 fans per home game in 2019, the last pre-COVID season. That's only 24th out of the NFL's 32 teams, but it's a sellout, because Soldier Field ranks dead last in the NFL in seating capacity. And the Bears -- yes, more than the Cubs, more than the post-Michael Jordan Bulls -- are easily the most popular sports team in Chicago. It's football city 1st, and an anything-else city 2nd.
Tickets in the lower level are $278 on the sidelines, and $150 in the end zone. In the middle level, they're $255 on the sidelines and $140 in the end zone. In the upper deck, they're $105 on the sidelines and $135 in the end zone.
Getting There. Chicago is 792 land miles from New York. And it's 786 miles from MetLife Stadium to Soldier Field. Knowing this, your first reaction is going to be to fly out there.
Ordinarily, this is a comparatively cheap flight. This time, you could get a round-trip nonstop flight for just $279 -- cheaper this time than either the train or the bus. O'Hare International Airport (named for Lt. Cmdr. Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's 1st flying ace who was nevertheless shot down over the Pacific in World War II), at the northwestern edge of the city, is United Airlines' headquarters, so nearly every flight they have from the New York area's airports to there is nonstop, so it'll be 3 hours, tarmac to tarmac, and about 2 hours going back.
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Blue Line train will take you from O'Hare to the downtown elevated (or "L") tracks that run in "The Loop" (the borders of which are Randolph, Wells, Van Buren and Wabash Streets) in 45 minutes. From Midway Airport, the Orange Line train can get you to the Loop. Both should take about 45 minutes.
Bus? Greyhound's run between the 2 cities, launched 5 times per day, is relatively easy, but long, averaging about 18 hours, and is $356 round-trip -- but can drop to as low as $222 on Advanced Purchase. Only 1 of the 5 runs goes straight there without requiring you to change buses: The one leaving Port Authority Bus Terminal at 10:15 PM (Eastern) and arriving at Chicago at 2:30 PM (Central). This includes half-hour rest stops at Milesburg, Pennsylvania and Elkhart, Indiana, and an hour-and-a-half stopover in Cleveland.
The station is at 630 W. Harrison Street at Des Plaines Street. (If you've seen one of my favorite movies, Midnight Run, this is a new station, not the one seen in that 1988 film.) The closest CTA stop is Clinton on the Blue Line, around the corner, underneath the elevated Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway.
The new Greyhound Station. It looks small
(especially under the Sears/Willis Tower), but it's very efficient.
Train? Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited (known as the Twentieth Century Limited when the old New York Central Railroad ran it from Grand Central Terminal to Chicago's LaSalle Street Station) leaves New York's Penn Station at 3:40 every afternoon, and arrives at Union Station at 225 South Canal Street at Adams Street in Chicago at 9:50 every morning. Going back, it leaves at 9:30 every evening and arrives back in New York at 6:42 PM the next day. It's $317 round-trip.
But since you've come all this way, it makes sense to get a hotel, so take a cab from Union Station or Greyhound to the hotel – unless you're flying in, in which case you can take the CTA train to within a block of a good hotel. There are also hotels near the airports.
If you decide to drive, it's far enough that it will help to get someone to go with you and split the duties, and to trade off driving and sleeping. The directions are rather simple, down to (quite literally) the last mile. You'll need to get into New Jersey, and take Interstate 80 West. You'll be on I-80 for the vast majority of the trip, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Ohio, in the western suburbs of Cleveland, I-80 will merge with Interstate 90. From this point onward, you won't need to think about I-80 until you head home; I-90 is now the key.
If you were going directly to Soldier Field (not a good idea, as you should go to your hotel first), you'd take Exit 53C (right after passing the White Sox' ballpark on your left), taking Interstate 55 East. Almost immediately, you will turn on U.S. Route 41 North. This is Lake Shore Drive. Turn right on East 18th Drive, between 2 parking lots.
If you do it right, you should spend about an hour and a half in New Jersey, 5 hours and 15 minutes in Pennsylvania, 4 hours in Ohio, 2 hours and 30 minutes in Indiana, and half an hour in Illinois before you reach the exit for your hotel. That's 13 hours and 45 minutes. Counting rest stops, preferably halfway through Pennsylvania and just after you enter both Ohio and Indiana, and accounting for traffic in both New York and Chicago, it should be no more than 18 hours, which would save you time on both Greyhound and Amtrak, if not on flying.
Once In the City. A derivation of a Native American name, "Chikagu" was translated as "Place of the onion," as there were onion fields there before there was a white settlement. Some have suggested the translation is a little off, that it should be "Place of the skunk." Others have said, either way, it means "Place of the big stink."
Founded in 1831, so by Northeastern standards it's a young city, Chicago's long-ago nickname of "the Second City" is no longer true, as its population has dropped, and Los Angeles' has risen, to the point where L.A. has passed it, and Chicago is now the 3rd-largest city in America. But, at 2.7 million within the city limits, and just under 10 million in the metropolitan area, it's still a huge city. And its legendary crime problem is still there, so whatever precautions you take when you're in New York, take them in Chicago as well.
The "Loop" is the connected part of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)'s elevated railway (sometimes written as "El" or "L") downtown: Over Wells Street on the west, Van Buren Street on the south, Wabash Street on the east and State Street on the north. Inside the Loop, the east-west streets are Lake, Randolph, Washington, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson and Van Buren; the north-south streets are Wells, LaSalle (Chicago's "Wall Street"), Clark, Dearborn, State and Wabash.
The city's street-address centerpoint is in the Loop, at State & Madison Streets. Madison separates North from South, while State separates East from West. The street grid is laid out so that every 800 on the house numbers is roughly 1 mile. As Soldier Field is at 1410 Museum Campus Drive, 333 West 35th Street, and on the 300 block of Waldron Drive, now you know it's a little less than half a mile east of State, and a mile and a half south of Madison.
Chicago has 2 "beltways": Interstate 294 forms an inner one, while Interstates 290 and 355 form an outer one. It also has highways named for 3 Presidents, and 1 defeated Presidential nominee from the Chicago area.
I-290 is the Eisenhower Expressway; a run that goes from I-90 to I-94 to I-190 is the Kennedy Expressway; I-88 from the suburbs west to the Mississippi River in Iowa is the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway (it passes his birthplace of Tampico and other towns where he grew up); and the Cook County portion of I-55 is the Stevenson Expressway, named for Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, grandson of Grover Cleveland's 2nd Vice President, Governor of Illinois 1949-53, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's defeated opponent of 1952 and 1956.
The CTA's rapid-rail system is both underground (subway) and above-ground (elevated or "El"), although the El is better-known, standing as a Chicago icon alongside the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, Michael Jordan, deep-dish pizza, and less savory things like municipal corruption, Mrs. O'Leary's cow and Al Capone. The single-ride fare is $2.50 for the El, $2.25 for the bus. A 1-day pass is $5, and a 3-day pass is $15.
I was actually in Chicago on the day they switched from tokens to farecards: June 1, 1999. It took me by surprise, as I had saved 10 tokens from my previous visit. I was able to use them all, because I'd gotten there 2 days before.
Illinois' State sales tax is 6.25 percent, but in the City of Chicago it's 9.25 percent -- higher than New York's. So don't be shocked when you see prices: Like New York, Boston and Washington, Chicago is an expensive city.
ZIP Codes in the Chicago area start with the digits 60. The Area Code is 312, with 708 and 847 in the suburbs. Just as New York's electric company is Consolidated Edison, or "Con Ed," Northern Illinois' is Commonwealth Edison, or "ComEd," which confused the heck out of me the 1st time I heard it.
Demographically, Chicago is split almost right down the middle: 35.5 percent black, 33.5 percent white, 23.9 percent Hispanic (as with most Midwestern cities, most of their Hispanics are Mexican rather than Puerto Rican or Cuban), with Asians trailing at 7.0 percent.
The South Side is the largest black neighborhood in the country, ahead of even New York's Harlem, and the West Side also has a large ghetto. But there are clumps of Irish and Poles on the South Side, and the Daley family lived in Bridgeport, a few blocks from Comiskey Park, and were White Sox fans. The North Side is now roughly split between white and Hispanic, with many Mexicans intermarrying with the Irish, Italians and Poles of the North and Northwest Sides, due to their common Catholicism.
Chicago has beaches! If not boardwalks. Lake Michigan even has tides. You can swim or get a tan while seeing a spectacular skyline -- something difficult, though not impossible, to do in New York City -- at Montrose Beach, 4400 N. Lake Shore Drive (Bus 146 to Marine Drive and Montrose, then a 15-minute walk east); Oakwood Beach, 4100 S. Lake Shore Drive (Red Line to 47th Street, then Bus 43 to Oakenwald & 43rd, then a 10-minute walk over Lake Shore Drive and north); and 57th Street Beach, 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive (Bus 10 to the Museum of Science and Industry, then a 10-minute walk east).
Going In. Soldier Field is at 1410 S. Museum Campus Drive, at McFetridge and Lake Shore Drives, about a mile and a half southeast of the Loop, and a 15-minute walk from the closest CTA station, Roosevelt station on the Green, Orange and Red Lines. If you drive in, parking is $25.
You can also take Metra Electric commuter rail from Millennium Station, formerly Randolph Street Station, at 151 E. Randolph Street, and ride 3 blocks south to 18th Street. The fare is $4.00 each way, and if you leave at 10:10 or 10:40 Central Time, you can get to 18th Street in 6 minutes, although it's a 20-minute walk to and over an overpass to the stadium, which is frustrating, since it's right there, across the tracks.
The original version of the stadium opened in 1924, and was dedicated to the men and women who served in World War I, and for years was best known as the site of the Chicago College All-Star Game (a team of graduating seniors playing the defending NFL Champions) from 1934 to 1976.
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It was the site of the 1927 heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, the famed "Long Count" fight, which may have had what remains the greatest attendance ever for a U.S. sporting event, with figures ranging from 104,000 to 130,000, depending on who you believe.
It definitely was the site of the largest football crowd ever, 123,000, to see Notre Dame play USC a few weeks after the Long Count. That record stood until a 2016 Tennessee-Virginia game was staged at Bristol Motor Speedway in front of 156,990. The 1926 Army-Navy Game was played there, in front of over 100,000.
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The Chicago Rockets of the All-America Football Conference played at Soldier Field in 1946, '47 and '48, changing their name to the Chicago Hornets in '49. They were not admitted into the NFL with their AAFC brethren in Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore. The Chicago Fire of the World Football League played there in 1974.
Amazingly, the Bears played at Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970, with the occasional single-game exception. The story I heard is that Bears founder-owner-coach George Halas was a good friend of both the Wrigley and Veeck families, and felt loyalty to them, and that's why he stayed at Wrigley even though it had just 47,000 seats for football.
But I heard another story that Halas was a Republican, and didn't like Chicago's Democratic Mayor, Richard J. Daley (whose son Richard M. later broke his father's record for longest-serving Mayor), and didn't want to pay the city Parks Department a lot of rent. This is believable, because Halas was known to be cheap: Mike Ditka, who nonetheless loved his old boss, said, "Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers." The real reason the Bears moved to Soldier Field in 1971 was Monday Night Football: Halas wanted the revenue, and Wrigley didn't have lights until 1988.
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Games of the 1994 World Cup and the 1999 Women's World Cup were also held at the old Soldier Field. MLS' Chicago Fire made it their 1st home ground.
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A 2002-03 renovation, during which the Bears played "home" games at the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium in Champaign, demolished all but the south gate, and the iconic (if not Ionic, they're in the Doric style) Greek-style columns that used to hang over the stadium, and are now visible only from the outside. It doesn't look like "Soldier Field" anymore: One critic called it The Eyesore on the Lake Shore.
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Capacity is now roughly what it was in the last few years prior to the renovation, 61,500. And while the Bears won 8 Championships while playing at Wrigley (it took the Cubs until 2016 to win even 1 title there), they've only won one more at Soldier Field, the 1985 title capped by Super Bowl XX. The Monsters of the Midway have been tremendous underachievers since leaving Wrigley, having been to only 1 of the last 35 Super Bowls, and losing it.
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The reduced atmosphere, and thus the reduced home-field advantage, may be a part of that, much as similar reductions in atmosphere, passion and on-field performance has been blamed by Washington Redskins fans on the 1997 move from the in-the-District Robert F. Kennedy Stadium to the suburban FedEx Field, Yankee Fans on the 2009 move from the old Yankee Stadium to the new one, and Arsenal fans on the 2006 move from Arsenal Stadium (a.k.a. "Highbury") to the Emirates Stadium.
But Thrillist disagrees. On September 12, 2017, they had an article ranking all 31 NFL stadiums.
Soldier Field came in 26th, or 6th from the bottom. Nevertheless, they said:
So let's get this out of the way -- the aforementioned renovation became something of a local punchline for its, shall we say, less than seamless fusing of the original facade with something more modern. But most people got over that quickly because the interior represented a VAST upgrade of sight lines and amenities, and at least the stadium remained situated on the lakefront, affording a fantastic atmosphere walking in through the surrounding museum campus as you look out on the rolling waves of Lake Michigan (even if traffic and parking are something of a nightmare).
Clearly, the article's author is not from Illinois, northern Indiana, or even eastern Iowa. On November 3, 2020, MoneyWise had an article on the worst NFL stadiums, and Soldier Field came in 8th, or 23rd out of 30.
* 1960s, including the 1963 NFL Championship Game, beating the Giants: Halas, Jones, George, Atkins, Ditka, and, after '63, Sayers and Butkus. Galimore is not in the Hall, but perhaps he should be.
* 1970s: Pretty much just administrative: Halas and general manager Jim Finks, but Payton arrived in 1975, and former Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Alan Page (82), began a 4-year run in Chicago in 1978.
* 2006 NFC Champions: So far, only linebacker Brain Urlacher (54). Cornerback Devin Hester (23) could get in, if the voters decided to consider kick-returning skills. And these Bears did have a running back named Adrian Peterson, but it wasn't that Adrian Peterson.
In 1994, Nagurski, Ditka, Sayers, Butkus and Payton were named to the NFL's 75th Anniversary Team. In 1999, in their 100 Greatest Football Players, The Sporting News ranked Payton 8th, Butkus 9th, Sayers 21st, Page 34th, Nagurski 35th, Luckman 39th, George 49th, Singletary 56th, Grange 80th, Ditka 90th and Blanda 98th. In 2010, in their 100 Greatest Players, the NFL Network ranked Payton 5th, Butkus 10th Nagurski 19th, Sayers 22nd, Luckman 33rd, Page 43rd, Grange 48th, Singletary 57th and Ditka 59th.
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Johnny Lujack, the 1947 Notre Dame quarterback, backed up and then succeeded Luckman, playing from 1948 to 1951. He was followed in 1972 by another Notre Dame quarterback, 1964 winner John Huarte. Quarterback Doug Flutie, the 1984 winner at Boston College, played with the Bears in 1986 and 1987. Running back Rashaan Salaam, the 1994 winner at Colorado, was with them from 1995 to 1997. And quarterback Danny Wuerffel, the 1996 winner at Florida, was with them in 2001.
Yet another Notre Dame quarterback to win the Heisman, 1943 winner Angelo Bertelli, played pro ball in Chicago, but not in the NFL: He played the 1947 and 1948 seasons with the Chicago Rockets of the All-America Football Conference, where his top receiver was Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch, the Wisconsin sensation who later starred for the Los Angeles Rams.
Of course, the Bears-Packers rivalry goes back to the Packers' entry into the NFL in 1921. In terms of wins, the rivalry is actually very close: The Packers lead it 103-95-6.
Stuff. The Bears Pro Shop is on the lower level of the northwest corner of the stadium.
There is a Chicago literary tradition, but the Bears have not produced the kind of prose that the glorious Michael Jordan and the (until recently) hard-luck Cubs have. In 2015, The Chicago Tribune Book of the Chicago Bears: A Decade-By-Decade History was published.
Books about individual Bear teams include: Monster of the Midway: Bronko Nagurski, the 1943 Chicago Bears, and the Greatest Comeback Ever, by Jim Dent of Junction Boys fame; Clouds Over the Goalpost: Gambling, Assassination, and the NFL in 1963, a great effort in which Lew Freedman discusses more than the Bears' title; and Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, a 30th Anniversary look by Rich Cohen.
Books about individual Bears include Jeff Davis' Papa Bear: The Life and Legacy of George Halas; Gary Andrew Poole's The Galloping Ghost: Red Grange, an American Football Legend; Ditka: An Autobiography; Gale Sayers' I Am Third, which inspired Brian's Song; the autobiography Butkus: Flesh and Blood; and Never Die Easy: The Autobiography of Walter Payton, released after his death.
Available DVDs include Chicago Bears: The Official History, produced by NFL Films in 2004; and a pair of documentaries about the "Super Bowl Shuffle" team, both released within the last year: ESPN's 30 for 30: The '85 Bears, and 85: The Greatest Team In Football History. (Not for an entire era. Maybe for a single season, and the 1972 Miami Dolphins would certainly dispute even that.)
During the Game. A recent Thrillist article on "The NFL's Most Obnoxious Fans" ranked Bear fans 12th, and was not kind:
You Bears fans like to fancy yourselves as one of America's proudest sporting traditions, but the cold reality is the only thing separating you from Cubs fans is one glorious lightning-in-a-bottle year in 1985 that you still cling to with adorable desperateness. Your most feared team in recent memory was helmed by the immortal Rex Grossman. Talk to any Bears fan and you'll get a sense of thoroughly undeserved self-importance mixed with Italian beef and a few expletives about Jay Cutler.
And that was written before the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016. So now, the droughts of Chicago's teams are: The Cubs, 2016; the Blackhawks, 2015; the White Sox, 2005; the Fire, 1998; the Bulls, 1998; and the Bears 1985, the longest. Heck, even Northwestern have won the Big Ten title 3 times since then, including once outright in 1995. Considering that the Bears are the NFL's founding franchise, and are in a big market, they should have won a title sometime in the last 36 years, more than 1 in the last 58, and 2 in the last 75.
So when the article was updated in 2019, the text read as follows:
Sidelights. Chicago is one of the best sports cities, not just in America, but on the planet. Check out the following – but do it in daylight, as the city's reputation for crime, while significantly reduced from its 1980s peak, is still there.
* Quad Cities. Rock Island and Moline, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, are, together, known as the Quad Cities. Together, these cities and adjoining smaller towns have a population of about 475,000. (Davenport about 100,000, Moline 44,000, Rock Island 39,000 and Bettendorf 35,000). Not big enough to be major league -- but some people tried.
The 5,000-seat Douglas Park was the home of the Rock Island Independents from 1907 to 1925, including 1920 to 1925 in the NFL. In fact, it was the site of the 1st NFL game, on October 3, 1920, a 45-0 Indys win over the Indiana-based Muncie Flyers. It was also home to a minor-league baseball team, the Rock Island Islanders, from 1907 to 1937, winning Class D Pennants in 1907, 1909 and 1932. West side of 10th Street between 15th and 18th Avenues in Rock Island, 180 miles west of Chicago.
One of the oldest surviving pro basketball teams is the Atlanta Hawks. They began as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks (they dropped Bettendorf from the "Quad Cities" description) in 1946. They weren't very good, and moved to Milwaukee in 1951, St. Louis in 1955, and Atlanta in 1968. They played at the 6,000-seat Wharton Field House, which opened in 1928 and still stands. 1800 20th Avenue.
There is a minor-league baseball team in the Quad Cities, but it's been known by various names since its inception in 1879 as the Davenport Brown Stockings. They've won 10 Pennants, previously in Class B, and in what's now Class A: In 1914, 1933 and 1936 as the Davenport Blue Sox; in 1949 as the Davenport Pirates; in 1968 and 1971 as the Quad City Angels; In 1979 as the Quad City Cubs; in 1990 again as the Quad City Angels; and in 2011 and 2013 under their current name, the Quad Cities River Bandits.
Since 1931, they have played at a stadium right on the Mississippi River, which proved a problem during the 1993 flood. The 4,024-seat ballpark was known as Municipal Stadium until 1971, then as John O'Donnell Stadium until 2008, when it became Modern Woodmen Park, as the fraternal organization bought naming rights. 209 S. Gaines Street in Davenport.
No President has ever come from Chicago, and none has a Presidential Library anywhere near it -- yet. Barack Obama has spent his adult life in Chicago, as a lawyer, law professor, and, famously "community organizer," before being elected to the Illinois State Senate, the U.S. Senate, and the Presidency in 2008 and 2012. Since he taught at the University of Chicago, his Library is being built there, at 6201 S. Stony Island Avenue. 63rd Street Station on the South Shore commuter line. It is scheduled to open in 2021.
Abraham Lincoln's Presidential Library is 200 miles away, in the State capital of Springfield. Many other Presidents have Chicago connections. Most notably, the 1st true Presidential Debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, was held on September 26, 1960, at the old CBS Studio, home to WBBM, 780 on your AM dial and Channel 2 on your TV. 630 N. McClurg Street. The building is no longer there. Red Line to Grand, then an 8-minute walk.
Every American should visit Chicago. Da Bears are one of North American sports' great franchises. Have fun -- but remember, be smart, and don't go out of your way to antagonize anyone.
But racial issues seem to have always been with Chicago, and have never gone away. There were race riots on the South Side in 1910, following Jack Johnson, the 1st black Heavyweight Champion, defeating the previously undefeated former Champion, "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries; another on the South Side in 1919; one in Cicero in 1951; and on the West Side in 1966 and 1968, the latter after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Just as the stereotype of New Yorkers getting old is moving to Florida, when Chicagoans get old, they tend to go to Arizona. Part of that is due to baseball, as Cubs owner Phil Wrigley owned a hotel in the Phoenix area, and moved the team's Spring Training there. The White Sox moved their Spring Training there as well.
Chicago has beaches! If not boardwalks. Lake Michigan even has tides. You can swim or get a tan while seeing a spectacular skyline -- something difficult, though not impossible, to do in New York City -- at Montrose Beach, 4400 N. Lake Shore Drive (Bus 146 to Marine Drive and Montrose, then a 15-minute walk east); Oakwood Beach, 4100 S. Lake Shore Drive (Red Line to 47th Street, then Bus 43 to Oakenwald & 43rd, then a 10-minute walk over Lake Shore Drive and north); and 57th Street Beach, 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive (Bus 10 to the Museum of Science and Industry, then a 10-minute walk east).
Going In. Soldier Field is at 1410 S. Museum Campus Drive, at McFetridge and Lake Shore Drives, about a mile and a half southeast of the Loop, and a 15-minute walk from the closest CTA station, Roosevelt station on the Green, Orange and Red Lines. If you drive in, parking is $25.
You can also take Metra Electric commuter rail from Millennium Station, formerly Randolph Street Station, at 151 E. Randolph Street, and ride 3 blocks south to 18th Street. The fare is $4.00 each way, and if you leave at 10:10 or 10:40 Central Time, you can get to 18th Street in 6 minutes, although it's a 20-minute walk to and over an overpass to the stadium, which is frustrating, since it's right there, across the tracks.
The original version of the stadium opened in 1924, and was dedicated to the men and women who served in World War I, and for years was best known as the site of the Chicago College All-Star Game (a team of graduating seniors playing the defending NFL Champions) from 1934 to 1976.
The original south side gate. Along with the columns,
it was the only thing saved from the original stadium.
It was the site of the 1927 heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, the famed "Long Count" fight, which may have had what remains the greatest attendance ever for a U.S. sporting event, with figures ranging from 104,000 to 130,000, depending on who you believe.
It definitely was the site of the largest football crowd ever, 123,000, to see Notre Dame play USC a few weeks after the Long Count. That record stood until a 2016 Tennessee-Virginia game was staged at Bristol Motor Speedway in front of 156,990. The 1926 Army-Navy Game was played there, in front of over 100,000.
It's "Soldier" Field. Never "Soldiers" or "Soldiers' Field."
There is a Soldiers Field in Boston,
part of Harvard University's sports complex.
Amazingly, the Bears played at Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970, with the occasional single-game exception. The story I heard is that Bears founder-owner-coach George Halas was a good friend of both the Wrigley and Veeck families, and felt loyalty to them, and that's why he stayed at Wrigley even though it had just 47,000 seats for football.
But I heard another story that Halas was a Republican, and didn't like Chicago's Democratic Mayor, Richard J. Daley (whose son Richard M. later broke his father's record for longest-serving Mayor), and didn't want to pay the city Parks Department a lot of rent. This is believable, because Halas was known to be cheap: Mike Ditka, who nonetheless loved his old boss, said, "Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers." The real reason the Bears moved to Soldier Field in 1971 was Monday Night Football: Halas wanted the revenue, and Wrigley didn't have lights until 1988.
Soldier Field during the 1994 World Cup
A 2002-03 renovation, during which the Bears played "home" games at the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium in Champaign, demolished all but the south gate, and the iconic (if not Ionic, they're in the Doric style) Greek-style columns that used to hang over the stadium, and are now visible only from the outside. It doesn't look like "Soldier Field" anymore: One critic called it The Eyesore on the Lake Shore.
But Thrillist disagrees. On September 12, 2017, they had an article ranking all 31 NFL stadiums.
Soldier Field came in 26th, or 6th from the bottom. Nevertheless, they said:
Clearly, the article's author is not from Illinois, northern Indiana, or even eastern Iowa. On November 3, 2020, MoneyWise had an article on the worst NFL stadiums, and Soldier Field came in 8th, or 23rd out of 30.
The field is aligned north-to-south, and, except for a dalliance with AstroTurf that lasted from 1971 to 1987, has always been real grass, both before and after the renovation.
Between the old Soldier Field and the new one, 14 matches of the U.S. soccer team have been played on the site, most recently a 2016 win over Costa Rica. The U.S. has won 7 of these games, lost 4 and tied 3. Since the new stadium opened, soccer has also been played there by the Brazilian national team against the U.S., and by club sides Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City of England; Real Madrid of Spain, against the MLS All-Stars in the 2017 MLS All-Star Game; A.C. Milan of Italy, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund of Germany, and Olympiacos of Greece.
An NHL Stadium Series game was played there on March 1, 2014, with the Blackhawks beating the Pittsburgh Penguins 5-1.
Soldier Field has a history of concerts that actually predates rock and roll. On August 21, 1937, the Chicagoland Music Festival was held there. Among the performers were classical violinist Jascha Heifetz and crooner Rudy Vallee. The CMF did not return until 1964, when the headliners were the not-yet-married Johnny Cash and June Carter.
Barbra Streisand sang there in 1966. In separate shows in 1977: Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Peter Frampton with Bob Seger opening. 1978: The Rolling Stones and Parliament-Funkadelic. Other major acts to perform at the old stadium: Bruce Springsteen in 1985, Madonna in 1987, Paul McCartney in 1990, Pearl Jam in 1995, and U2 in 1997. The Grateful Dead played it 9 times, including what turned out to be Jerry Garcia's last concert, on July 9, 1995.
Since the new stadium opened: The Stones hosted the 1st show in 2005, Bon Jovi in 2006, The Eagles in 2010, Taylor Swift in 2013, and Metallica in 2017. Jay-Z appeared in 2013 with Justin Timberlake, and in 2014 and 2018 with Beyoncé, who came alone in 2016.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a campaign rally at the old stadium in 1944. Between his firing by President Harry Truman and his famous address to Congress in April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur spoke there. The Chicago Freedom Movement held rallies there in 1965 and 1966, with Martin Luther King speaking at both, and with the 2nd featuring Mahalia Jackson and 15-year-old Stevie Wonder.
The old stadium was shown in the 1977 documentary film Powers of Ten, while the new one was shown in the 2006 World War II film Flags of Our Fathers, and in a couple of episodes of NBC's drama series Chicago Fire.
Between the old Soldier Field and the new one, 14 matches of the U.S. soccer team have been played on the site, most recently a 2016 win over Costa Rica. The U.S. has won 7 of these games, lost 4 and tied 3. Since the new stadium opened, soccer has also been played there by the Brazilian national team against the U.S., and by club sides Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City of England; Real Madrid of Spain, against the MLS All-Stars in the 2017 MLS All-Star Game; A.C. Milan of Italy, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund of Germany, and Olympiacos of Greece.
An NHL Stadium Series game was played there on March 1, 2014, with the Blackhawks beating the Pittsburgh Penguins 5-1.
Soldier Field has a history of concerts that actually predates rock and roll. On August 21, 1937, the Chicagoland Music Festival was held there. Among the performers were classical violinist Jascha Heifetz and crooner Rudy Vallee. The CMF did not return until 1964, when the headliners were the not-yet-married Johnny Cash and June Carter.
Barbra Streisand sang there in 1966. In separate shows in 1977: Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Peter Frampton with Bob Seger opening. 1978: The Rolling Stones and Parliament-Funkadelic. Other major acts to perform at the old stadium: Bruce Springsteen in 1985, Madonna in 1987, Paul McCartney in 1990, Pearl Jam in 1995, and U2 in 1997. The Grateful Dead played it 9 times, including what turned out to be Jerry Garcia's last concert, on July 9, 1995.
Since the new stadium opened: The Stones hosted the 1st show in 2005, Bon Jovi in 2006, The Eagles in 2010, Taylor Swift in 2013, and Metallica in 2017. Jay-Z appeared in 2013 with Justin Timberlake, and in 2014 and 2018 with Beyoncé, who came alone in 2016.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a campaign rally at the old stadium in 1944. Between his firing by President Harry Truman and his famous address to Congress in April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur spoke there. The Chicago Freedom Movement held rallies there in 1965 and 1966, with Martin Luther King speaking at both, and with the 2nd featuring Mahalia Jackson and 15-year-old Stevie Wonder.
The old stadium was shown in the 1977 documentary film Powers of Ten, while the new one was shown in the 2006 World War II film Flags of Our Fathers, and in a couple of episodes of NBC's drama series Chicago Fire.
Because of its comparatively small size, problematic location, and complaints about it being an eyesore, Bears management are exploring their options. This past September, the Bears agreed to buy the recently-closed Arlington Park racetrack in suburban Arlington, Illinois.
Food. As one of America's greatest food cities, in Big Ten Country where tailgate parties are practically a sacrament, you would expect the Chicago football stadium to have lots of good options. It does. However, the MoneyWise article I mentioned earlier has as its biggest complaint the long wait for the food, and its prices.
Food. As one of America's greatest food cities, in Big Ten Country where tailgate parties are practically a sacrament, you would expect the Chicago football stadium to have lots of good options. It does. However, the MoneyWise article I mentioned earlier has as its biggest complaint the long wait for the food, and its prices.
You want burgers, they got that. You want hot dogs and ethnic sausages, they got that. You want Chicago-style deep dish pizza, they got that. You want candied bacon, dusted in brain sugar and slow-smoked until brittle, from a place called "Pork & Mindy's"... then you might want to ask where the First Aid station is, because you're going to have a heart attack like Chris Farley's character did every time Saturday Night Live did the "Da Bears" sketch. Anyway, here's a guide to concessions at Soldier Field.
Team History Displays. The Chicago Bears have won the NFL Championship in the seasons of 1921, 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1946, 1963 and 1985, the last of these by winning Super Bowl XX on January 26, 1986. That's 9 World Championships, more than any other NFL team except their arch-rivals, the Green Bay Packers, with 13; and 1 more than the next-best team, the Giants. In fact, 9 titles is as many as the Giants and the Jets combined.
They just missed the title in the single-Division NFL in 1920, 1924 and 1926; won their Division but lost the NFL Championship Game in 1934 (undefeated going in), 1937, 1942 (undefeated going in) and 1956. They won the NFC Championship in the 2006 season, but lost Super Bowl XLI. They reached the NFC Championship Game but lost it in the seasons of 1984, 1988 and 2010.
They won the NFC Central Division in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990 and 2001. The next season, realignment took the Tampa Bay Buccaneers out, but the new NFC North Division still had the Bears, the Packers, and their Midwestern brethren, the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings, so it was still "the Black and Blue Division." The Bears have won it in 2005, 2006, 2010 and 2018, for a total of 24 1st-place finishes. They also lost a playoff for the old NFL West Division in 1950, and won NFC Wild Card berths in 1977, 1979, 1991, 1994 and 2020. So that's 29 Playoff berths in 101 seasons. A display for their 9 titles at an end zone.
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There a display for the Bears' retired uniform numbers in a Ring of Honor. They have 14, more than any other NFL team. After finally mending an 11-year feud with Mike Ditka and honoring him in 2013, the Bears announced that no further numbers would be retired. So far, it hasn't exactly been necessary. Here are the honorees:
* 3, Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski, running back and linebacker, 1930-37, with a comeback that helped them win the 1943 NFL Championship.
* 5, George McAfee, 2-way back, 1940-50.
* 7, George Halas, 2-way end 1920-29; head coach 1920-67 (except for 1930-32, 1943-45 when he was serving as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II, and 1956-57); general manager 1920-62; and owner 1920-83, up until his death.
* 28, Willie Galimore, running back, 1957-63, killed in a car crash along with fellow running back Bo Farrington outside training camp in 1964.
* 34, Walter Payton, running back, 1975-87.
* 40, Gale Sayers, running back, 1965-71.
* 41, Brian Piccolo, running back, 1965-69, died of cancer the next season, inspiring the 1971 film Brian's Song, starring a pre-Star Wars, pre-Colt 45 commercials Billy Dee Williams as Sayers and a pre-Godfather James Caan as Piccolo.
* 42, Sid Luckman, quarterback and defensive back, 1939-50. One of the founding fathers of quarterbacking, he's still the only quarterback to make the Hall of Fame based on what he did as a Bear.
* 51, Dick Butkus, linebacker, 1965-73. For the generation before Mean Joe Greene and Lawrence Taylor, this man was the defining figure in mean defensive players.
* 56, Bill Hewitt, 2-way end, 1933-36.
* 61, Bill George, linebacker, 1952-65. In a 1989 Sports Illustrated column, Rick Reilly called him "the meanest Bear ever."
* 66, Clyde "Bulldog" Turner, center and linebacker, 1940-52.
* 77, Harold "Red" Grange, running back and defensive back, 1925, and a return 1929-34. His 77 was the 1st truly iconic uniform number in sports.
* 89, Mike Ditka, tight end 1961-66, head coach 1982-92. Since the death of Halas, he has been the public face of the Chicago Bears, when Halas' heirs have liked it, and when they haven't.
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In 1963, Halas was the 1st man elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and won his last NFL Championship. That year, he appointed his son, George Halas Jr., a.k.a. Mugs Halas, as general manager. He was supposed to succeed dear old Dad as boss of the franchise. But Mugs died at the end of the 1979 season, throwing the franchise into organizational disarray. Despite the team's 1980s on-field successes, it has never really recovered.
When Papa Bear died in 1983, his initials "GSH" were sewn onto the left sleeve of every Bears uniform, and there they have remained ever since. The team's training facility in the northern suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois is named for him: Halas Hall. That town's name has given rise to a joke: Bear fans "can't see Lake Forest for the trees."
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Since the NFL is an old boys' network, and Halas' only surviving child, his daughter Virginia, didn't want to actually run the team anyway, control passed to her husband, Big Ed McCaskey. He appointed his son Mike McCaskey as actual operator, and he proceeded to take what was built by general manager Jim Finks, head coach Mike Ditka, and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, and wreck it, until Big Ed finally did what Charles Dolan still refuses to do with son James at Madison Square Garden: Took the keys away.
Bears in the Pro Football Hall of Fame include:
* 1920s, including the 1921 NFL Championship: Halas, Grange, quarterback (but not really a passer) and defensive back John "Paddy" Driscoll (who wore Number 1), center and defensive tackle George Trafton (13), and 2-way tackle Ed Healey (16).
* 1932 and 1933 NFL Championships: Halas, Grange, Nagurski, Hewitt, Trafton, 2-way tackle William "Link" Lyman (110, guard George Musso (16).
* 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1946 NFL Championships, including going to Washington and beat the Redskins by a record blowout of 73-0 in the NFL Championship Game, the game that got the Bears nicknamed "The Monsters of the Midway": Halas, Nagurski, Luckman, McAfee, Turner, Musso, 2-way tackle Joe Stydahar (13, later coached the Los Angeles Rams to the 1951 NFL Championship), and guard and defensive tackle Dan Fortmann (21). Defensive end Ed Sprinkle (7) was on the '46 title team, and is in the Hall.
Team History Displays. The Chicago Bears have won the NFL Championship in the seasons of 1921, 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1946, 1963 and 1985, the last of these by winning Super Bowl XX on January 26, 1986. That's 9 World Championships, more than any other NFL team except their arch-rivals, the Green Bay Packers, with 13; and 1 more than the next-best team, the Giants. In fact, 9 titles is as many as the Giants and the Jets combined.
They just missed the title in the single-Division NFL in 1920, 1924 and 1926; won their Division but lost the NFL Championship Game in 1934 (undefeated going in), 1937, 1942 (undefeated going in) and 1956. They won the NFC Championship in the 2006 season, but lost Super Bowl XLI. They reached the NFC Championship Game but lost it in the seasons of 1984, 1988 and 2010.
They won the NFC Central Division in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990 and 2001. The next season, realignment took the Tampa Bay Buccaneers out, but the new NFC North Division still had the Bears, the Packers, and their Midwestern brethren, the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings, so it was still "the Black and Blue Division." The Bears have won it in 2005, 2006, 2010 and 2018, for a total of 24 1st-place finishes. They also lost a playoff for the old NFL West Division in 1950, and won NFC Wild Card berths in 1977, 1979, 1991, 1994 and 2020. So that's 29 Playoff berths in 101 seasons. A display for their 9 titles at an end zone.
* 3, Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski, running back and linebacker, 1930-37, with a comeback that helped them win the 1943 NFL Championship.
* 5, George McAfee, 2-way back, 1940-50.
* 7, George Halas, 2-way end 1920-29; head coach 1920-67 (except for 1930-32, 1943-45 when he was serving as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II, and 1956-57); general manager 1920-62; and owner 1920-83, up until his death.
* 28, Willie Galimore, running back, 1957-63, killed in a car crash along with fellow running back Bo Farrington outside training camp in 1964.
* 34, Walter Payton, running back, 1975-87.
* 40, Gale Sayers, running back, 1965-71.
* 41, Brian Piccolo, running back, 1965-69, died of cancer the next season, inspiring the 1971 film Brian's Song, starring a pre-Star Wars, pre-Colt 45 commercials Billy Dee Williams as Sayers and a pre-Godfather James Caan as Piccolo.
* 42, Sid Luckman, quarterback and defensive back, 1939-50. One of the founding fathers of quarterbacking, he's still the only quarterback to make the Hall of Fame based on what he did as a Bear.
* 51, Dick Butkus, linebacker, 1965-73. For the generation before Mean Joe Greene and Lawrence Taylor, this man was the defining figure in mean defensive players.
* 56, Bill Hewitt, 2-way end, 1933-36.
* 61, Bill George, linebacker, 1952-65. In a 1989 Sports Illustrated column, Rick Reilly called him "the meanest Bear ever."
* 66, Clyde "Bulldog" Turner, center and linebacker, 1940-52.
* 77, Harold "Red" Grange, running back and defensive back, 1925, and a return 1929-34. His 77 was the 1st truly iconic uniform number in sports.
* 89, Mike Ditka, tight end 1961-66, head coach 1982-92. Since the death of Halas, he has been the public face of the Chicago Bears, when Halas' heirs have liked it, and when they haven't.
When Papa Bear died in 1983, his initials "GSH" were sewn onto the left sleeve of every Bears uniform, and there they have remained ever since. The team's training facility in the northern suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois is named for him: Halas Hall. That town's name has given rise to a joke: Bear fans "can't see Lake Forest for the trees."
Gale Sayers, George Halas and Dick Butkus
Since the NFL is an old boys' network, and Halas' only surviving child, his daughter Virginia, didn't want to actually run the team anyway, control passed to her husband, Big Ed McCaskey. He appointed his son Mike McCaskey as actual operator, and he proceeded to take what was built by general manager Jim Finks, head coach Mike Ditka, and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, and wreck it, until Big Ed finally did what Charles Dolan still refuses to do with son James at Madison Square Garden: Took the keys away.
Bears in the Pro Football Hall of Fame include:
* 1920s, including the 1921 NFL Championship: Halas, Grange, quarterback (but not really a passer) and defensive back John "Paddy" Driscoll (who wore Number 1), center and defensive tackle George Trafton (13), and 2-way tackle Ed Healey (16).
* 1932 and 1933 NFL Championships: Halas, Grange, Nagurski, Hewitt, Trafton, 2-way tackle William "Link" Lyman (110, guard George Musso (16).
* 1940, 1941, 1943 and 1946 NFL Championships, including going to Washington and beat the Redskins by a record blowout of 73-0 in the NFL Championship Game, the game that got the Bears nicknamed "The Monsters of the Midway": Halas, Nagurski, Luckman, McAfee, Turner, Musso, 2-way tackle Joe Stydahar (13, later coached the Los Angeles Rams to the 1951 NFL Championship), and guard and defensive tackle Dan Fortmann (21). Defensive end Ed Sprinkle (7) was on the '46 title team, and is in the Hall.
* 1950s, including reaching the 1956 NFL Championship Game but losing it to the Giants: Halas, Driscoll back as head coach, George, quarterback George Blanda (16, 10 seasons as a Bear but really got into the Hall for what he did afterward), offensive tackle and linebacker George Connor (71), offensive tackle Stan Jones (78, known as the 1st NFL player to ignore conventional wisdom and start weight training), defensive end Doug Atkins (81).
* 1960s, including the 1963 NFL Championship Game, beating the Giants: Halas, Jones, George, Atkins, Ditka, and, after '63, Sayers and Butkus. Galimore is not in the Hall, but perhaps he should be.
* 1970s: Pretty much just administrative: Halas and general manager Jim Finks, but Payton arrived in 1975, and former Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Alan Page (82), began a 4-year run in Chicago in 1978.
* 1985 NFL Champions and winners of Super Bowl XX: Ditka as head coach, Payton, offensive tackle Jim "Jimbo" Covertlinebacker Mike Singletary (50), and defensive ends Richard De, nt (95) and Dan Hampton (99). Defensive tackle William "the Refrigerator" Perry (72) became a pop culture figure, but is not in the Hall. Nor is the Bears' all-time leader in tackles, safety Gary Fencik (45), a Yale graduate and off-season stockbroker known as "Super Yuppie." Nor are quarterback Jim McMahon (9), linebacker Wilbert Marshall (58), guard Jay Hilgenberg (63), offensive tackle Jim Covert (74), or defensive tackle Steve McMichael (76), all of whom should get another look by the voters. Dick Stanfel, the offensive line coach, is in the Hall, but as a player for Detroit's 1950s NFL Champions.
* 1990s: Aside from 1980s spillover at the start of the decade, Singletary, Dent and Hampton, nobody yet. It's hard to imagine anyone getting in, with the possible exception of defensive end Trace Armstrong (93).
* 2006 NFC Champions: So far, only linebacker Brain Urlacher (54). Cornerback Devin Hester (23) could get in, if the voters decided to consider kick-returning skills. And these Bears did have a running back named Adrian Peterson, but it wasn't that Adrian Peterson.
In 1994, Nagurski, Ditka, Sayers, Butkus and Payton were named to the NFL's 75th Anniversary Team. In 1999, in their 100 Greatest Football Players, The Sporting News ranked Payton 8th, Butkus 9th, Sayers 21st, Page 34th, Nagurski 35th, Luckman 39th, George 49th, Singletary 56th, Grange 80th, Ditka 90th and Blanda 98th. In 2010, in their 100 Greatest Players, the NFL Network ranked Payton 5th, Butkus 10th Nagurski 19th, Sayers 22nd, Luckman 33rd, Page 43rd, Grange 48th, Singletary 57th and Ditka 59th.
In 2019, Halas, Hewitt, Fortmann, Atkins, Ditka, Sayers, Butkus, Payton and Hester were named to the NFL's 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. Grange, Nagurski and Luckman were listed as finalists, but didn't get in.
Despite their long history, and the many great collegiate players to have made their roster, the Bears do not have much of a history when it comes to winners of the Heisman Trophy. They've had 5, but only 1 lasted into a 4th season with them, and none into a 5th.
Johnny Lujack, the 1947 Notre Dame quarterback, backed up and then succeeded Luckman, playing from 1948 to 1951. He was followed in 1972 by another Notre Dame quarterback, 1964 winner John Huarte. Quarterback Doug Flutie, the 1984 winner at Boston College, played with the Bears in 1986 and 1987. Running back Rashaan Salaam, the 1994 winner at Colorado, was with them from 1995 to 1997. And quarterback Danny Wuerffel, the 1996 winner at Florida, was with them in 2001.
Yet another Notre Dame quarterback to win the Heisman, 1943 winner Angelo Bertelli, played pro ball in Chicago, but not in the NFL: He played the 1947 and 1948 seasons with the Chicago Rockets of the All-America Football Conference, where his top receiver was Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch, the Wisconsin sensation who later starred for the Los Angeles Rams.
Of course, the Bears-Packers rivalry goes back to the Packers' entry into the NFL in 1921. In terms of wins, the rivalry is actually very close: The Packers lead it 103-95-6.
Stuff. The Bears Pro Shop is on the lower level of the northwest corner of the stadium.
There is a Chicago literary tradition, but the Bears have not produced the kind of prose that the glorious Michael Jordan and the (until recently) hard-luck Cubs have. In 2015, The Chicago Tribune Book of the Chicago Bears: A Decade-By-Decade History was published.
Books about individual Bear teams include: Monster of the Midway: Bronko Nagurski, the 1943 Chicago Bears, and the Greatest Comeback Ever, by Jim Dent of Junction Boys fame; Clouds Over the Goalpost: Gambling, Assassination, and the NFL in 1963, a great effort in which Lew Freedman discusses more than the Bears' title; and Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, a 30th Anniversary look by Rich Cohen.
Books about individual Bears include Jeff Davis' Papa Bear: The Life and Legacy of George Halas; Gary Andrew Poole's The Galloping Ghost: Red Grange, an American Football Legend; Ditka: An Autobiography; Gale Sayers' I Am Third, which inspired Brian's Song; the autobiography Butkus: Flesh and Blood; and Never Die Easy: The Autobiography of Walter Payton, released after his death.
Available DVDs include Chicago Bears: The Official History, produced by NFL Films in 2004; and a pair of documentaries about the "Super Bowl Shuffle" team, both released within the last year: ESPN's 30 for 30: The '85 Bears, and 85: The Greatest Team In Football History. (Not for an entire era. Maybe for a single season, and the 1972 Miami Dolphins would certainly dispute even that.)
During the Game. A recent Thrillist article on "The NFL's Most Obnoxious Fans" ranked Bear fans 12th, and was not kind:
You Bears fans like to fancy yourselves as one of America's proudest sporting traditions, but the cold reality is the only thing separating you from Cubs fans is one glorious lightning-in-a-bottle year in 1985 that you still cling to with adorable desperateness. Your most feared team in recent memory was helmed by the immortal Rex Grossman. Talk to any Bears fan and you'll get a sense of thoroughly undeserved self-importance mixed with Italian beef and a few expletives about Jay Cutler.
And that was written before the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016. So now, the droughts of Chicago's teams are: The Cubs, 2016; the Blackhawks, 2015; the White Sox, 2005; the Fire, 1998; the Bulls, 1998; and the Bears 1985, the longest. Heck, even Northwestern have won the Big Ten title 3 times since then, including once outright in 1995. Considering that the Bears are the NFL's founding franchise, and are in a big market, they should have won a title sometime in the last 36 years, more than 1 in the last 58, and 2 in the last 75.
So when the article was updated in 2019, the text read as follows:
You Bears fans like to fancy yourselves as one of America’s proudest sporting traditions, but the cold reality is that outside of one glorious lightning-in-a-bottle year in 1985 that you still cling to with adorable desperateness, you're the major-market Browns. Your most feared team in recent memory was helmed by the immortal Rex Grossman. Talk to any Bears fan and you’ll get a sense of thoroughly undeserved self-importance mixed with Italian beef, a few expletives about Jay Cutler, and considering drafting a kicker in the first round.
Chicago fans can get a bit rough, and they do like to drink. However, their rivalry with the Giants rarely comes up, and they have no rivalry at all with the Jets. Don't insult any Bear legends, and don't speak well of the Packers, and you should be all right.From September 1 to 7, 2017, early in the NFL National Anthem protest controversy,
FiveThirtyEight.com polled fans of the 32 NFL teams, to see where they leaned politically. As you might expect from such a Democratic stronghold, Bear fans were in the top 10 of most liberal NFL fans, rated 11.2 percent more liberal than conservative.
The Bears have perhaps the oldest fight song in the NFL, "Bear Down, Chicago Bears." It also has the best pedigree of any NFL fight song, because it was written in 1941 by Al Hoffman, who wrote such classics as Fred Waring's "Fit as a Fiddle," Ted Weems'"Heartaches" (later the Marcels' follow-up to "Blue Moon"), Eileen Barton's "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake," Billy Eckstine's "I Apologize," Patti Page's "Allegheny Moon," Perry Como's "Hot Diggity," Jimmie Rodgers'"Oh-Oh, I'm Falling In Love Again" and "Secretly," the novelty song "Mairzy Doats," and many others.
In 1976, George Halas hired a cheerleading troupe, and called them the Chicago Honey Bears. After his death, his daughter Virginia McCaskey, believing the concept of cheerleaders to be sexist and degrading, fired them. Then she found out she couldn't, as they had a contract running through the end of the 1985 season. They performed on the last day of that season, Super Bowl XX, at the Superdome in New Orleans. Their contract having run out, they were not renewed.
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There are people who believe in The Honey Bear Curse, because the Bears haven't won a Super Bowl since their last day on the job. But Mrs. McCaskey says there will never be another Bears cheerleader for as long as she lives. (She turns 99 next week. Her father lived to be 88.) As a result, the Bears are 1 of 6 NFL teams that doesn't have cheerleaders. The others are the Giants, the Packers, the Buffalo Bills, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns.
In 2003, the Bears introduced a mascot, Staley Da Bear. He wears a Number 00 jersey, which is common among mascots. Obviously, "Da Bear" is a reference to that Saturday Night Live sketch. So where does "Staley" come from?
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The Bears began as a "company team" (what the British would call a "works side") in 1920, because former University of Illinois end George Halas was working for the A.E. Staley Starch Company in Decatur, Illinois. Halas and some friends from football formed the NFL in Canton, Ohio, and the Decatur Staleys were a charter team. In 1921, he moved the team to his hometown, and they became the Chicago Staleys. His contract with Staley up, in 1922 he renamed them in honor of the team whose ballpark he was renting, the Cubs: They became the Chicago Bears.
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FiveThirtyEight.com polled fans of the 32 NFL teams, to see where they leaned politically. As you might expect from such a Democratic stronghold, Bear fans were in the top 10 of most liberal NFL fans, rated 11.2 percent more liberal than conservative.
The Bears have perhaps the oldest fight song in the NFL, "Bear Down, Chicago Bears." It also has the best pedigree of any NFL fight song, because it was written in 1941 by Al Hoffman, who wrote such classics as Fred Waring's "Fit as a Fiddle," Ted Weems'"Heartaches" (later the Marcels' follow-up to "Blue Moon"), Eileen Barton's "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake," Billy Eckstine's "I Apologize," Patti Page's "Allegheny Moon," Perry Como's "Hot Diggity," Jimmie Rodgers'"Oh-Oh, I'm Falling In Love Again" and "Secretly," the novelty song "Mairzy Doats," and many others.
In 1976, George Halas hired a cheerleading troupe, and called them the Chicago Honey Bears. After his death, his daughter Virginia McCaskey, believing the concept of cheerleaders to be sexist and degrading, fired them. Then she found out she couldn't, as they had a contract running through the end of the 1985 season. They performed on the last day of that season, Super Bowl XX, at the Superdome in New Orleans. Their contract having run out, they were not renewed.
In 2003, the Bears introduced a mascot, Staley Da Bear. He wears a Number 00 jersey, which is common among mascots. Obviously, "Da Bear" is a reference to that Saturday Night Live sketch. So where does "Staley" come from?
It's not easy to be a football mascot. You have to look
cuddly enough to make children like you, but at least provide
the illusion of being fierce enough to intimidate opponents.
The Bears began as a "company team" (what the British would call a "works side") in 1920, because former University of Illinois end George Halas was working for the A.E. Staley Starch Company in Decatur, Illinois. Halas and some friends from football formed the NFL in Canton, Ohio, and the Decatur Staleys were a charter team. In 1921, he moved the team to his hometown, and they became the Chicago Staleys. His contract with Staley up, in 1922 he renamed them in honor of the team whose ballpark he was renting, the Cubs: They became the Chicago Bears.
The Chicago mascots at a Blackhawks game. Top, left to right:
Staley Da Bear, Tommy Hawk, Clark the Cub,
and the White Sox' Southpaw. Bottom: Benny the Bull.
The Bears hold auditions for National Anthem singers, instead of having a regular. They do, occasionally, call on the Blackhawks' regular singer, Jim Cornelison.
After the Game. Soldier Field is in the Museum District, with the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium just to the north. It's not in an unsafe neighborhood; in fact, it's not in any neighborhood. As long as you don't talk smack to the locals, your safety should not be at issue.
If you want to be around other New Yorkers, Racine Plumbing Bar and Grill is known to be a place where New York Giants fans gather. 2642 N. Lincoln Avenue at Kenmore. Brown or Purple Line to Diversey. And The Country Club, formerly Rebel Bar and Grill, shows Jets games. It's just south of Wrigley at 3462 N. Clark at Cornelia Avenue.
If your visit to Chicago is during the European soccer season (which we are currently in), the best place to watch your favorite club is at The Globe Pub, 1934 W. Irving Park Rd., about 6 miles northwest of The Loop. Brown Line to Irving Park.
Sidelights. Chicago is one of the best sports cities, not just in America, but on the planet. Check out the following – but do it in daylight, as the city's reputation for crime, while significantly reduced from its 1980s peak, is still there.
On February 3, 2017, Thrillist made a list ranking the 30 NFL cities (New York and Los Angeles each having 2 teams), and Chicago came in 5th. On November 30, 2018, Thrillist published a list of "America's 25 Most Fun Cities," and, as you might expect from America's 3rd-largest city, Chicago came in 3rd.
* Wrigley Field. Opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park for the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, the Cubs moved in for the 1916 season and have been here for a century. William Wrigley Jr. bought the team and the ballpark in 1925 and renamed it Wrigley Field.
It's known for its brick wall surrounding the field, the ivy covering the bricks in the outfield, the trapezoidal bleachers, the big hand-operated scoreboard on top, and famously refusing to add lights until 1988, playing all day games. The Cubs have won 6 Pennants here, but the last was in 1945. The Bears played here from 1921 to 1970, winning 8 NFL Championships in the pre-Super Bowl era. Wrigley (still known as Cubs Park) was also home of the Chicago Tigers, who played in the NFL only in its 1st season, 1920.
It is by far the oldest ballpark in the National League, and next to Fenway Park in Boston the 2nd-oldest in Major League Baseball. 1060 W. Addison Street. Red Line to Addison.
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* Guaranteed Rate Field. Home of the White Sox since 1991, they've made the Playoffs 4 times since, including winning the 2005 World Series. 333 W. 35th Street at Shields Avenue (a.k.a. Bill Veeck Drive), off the Dan Ryan Expressway. Red Line to Sox-35th.
It was originally named the new Comiskey Park, and then U.S. Cellular Field in 2003. On November 1, 2016, the naming rights to the stadium were sold, and it became Guaranteed Rate Field. No more "The Cell," it's "The Rate" or "G-Rate." Yeah, I know, not the best thing to do while the other major league team in town is playing in the World Series.
* Site of old Comiskey Park. The longtime home of the White Sox, 1910 to 1990, was at 324 W. 35th Street at Shields Avenue (a.k.a. Bill Veeck Drive), and is now a parking lot, with its infield painted in.
The NFL's Chicago Cardinals played there from 1922 to 1959, and the franchise, now the Arizona Cardinals, won what remains their only NFL Championship Game (they didn't call 'em Super Bowls back then) there in 1947. The Chicago Sting of the old North American Soccer League played there from 1980 to 1982, won the league title in 1981 and 1984, and hosted the 1st leg of Soccer Bowl '84.
Comiskey Park hosted 3 fights for the Heavyweight Championship of the World: Joe Louis winning the title by knocking out "Cinderella Man" Jim Braddock on June 22, 1937; Ezzard Charles defeating Jersey Joe Walcott for the title vacated by Louis' retirement on June 22, 1949; and Sonny Liston knocking out Floyd Patterson to take the title on September 25, 1962.
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* Previous Chicago ballparks. The Cubs previously played at these parks:
State Street Grounds, also called 23rd Street Grounds, 1874-77, winning the NL's 1st Pennant in 1876, 23rd, State, and Federal Streets & Cermak Road (formerly 22nd Street), Red Line to Cermak-Chinatown.
Lakefront Park, also called Union Base-Ball Grounds and White-Stocking Park (the Cubs used the name "Chicago White Stockings" until 1900, and the AL entry then took the name), 1878-84, winning the 1880, '81 and '82 Pennants, Michigan Avenue & Randolph Street in the northwest corner of what's now Millennium Park, with (appropriately) Wrigley Square built on the precise site. Randolph/Wabash or Madison/Wabash stops on the Loop.
West Side Park I, 1885-91, winning the 1885 and '86 Pennants, at Congress, Loomis, Harrison & Throop Streets, now part of the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Blue Line to Racine.
South Side Park, 1891-93, just east of where the Comiskey Parks were built.
West Side Park II, 1893-1915, winning the 1906 and 1910 Pennants and the 1907 and 1908 World Series, the only World Series the Cubs have ever won, at Taylor, Wood and Polk Streets and Wolcott Avenue, now the site of a medical campus that includes the Cook County Hospital, the basis for the TV show ER, Pink Line to Polk. (Yes, the CTA has a Pink Line.)
Prior to the original Comiskey Park, the White Sox played at a different building called South Side Park, at 39th Street (now Pershing Road), 38th Street, & Wentworth and Princeton Avenues, a few blocks south of the Comiskey Parks.
* United Center and site of Chicago Stadium. From 1929 to 1994, the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks played at Chicago Stadium, "the Madhouse on Madison," at 1800 W. Madison Street at Wood Street. The NBA's Bulls played there from 1967 to 1994. The United Center opened across the street at 1901 W. Madison at Honore Street.
At the old Stadium, the Blackhawks won Stanley Cups in 1934, '38 and '61, and the Bulls won NBA Titles in 1991, '92 and '93. At the United Center, the Bulls won in 1996, '97 and '98 and the Blackhawks won the 2010 and '13 Cups -- and, as of this writing, have advanced to the Western Conference Finals for the 4th time in the last 6 seasons. The city's 1st NBA team, the Chicago Stags, played there from 1946 to 1950, and reached the 1st NBA Finals there in 1947. It hosted the NCAA Frozen Four in 2017, and hosts the annual Champions Classic, a college basketball season-opening tournament.
Chicago Stadium hosted 4 fights for the Heavyweight Championship of the World: Joe Louis defending the title by knocking out Harry Thomas on April 4, 1938; Ezzard Charles defending the title by defeating Light Heavyweight Champion Joey Maxim on May 30, 1951; Rocky Marciano defending the title he'd won from Jersey Joe Walcott the year before by knocking Walcott out in the 1st round on May 15, 1953; and Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore, the last man Marciano beat before his retirement vacated the title, facing Olympic champion Floyd Patterson, with Patterson winning, on November 30, 1956.
The Democrats had their Convention at Chicago Stadium in 1932, '40 and '44, nominating Franklin D. Roosevelt each time; the Republicans also had their Convention there in '32 and '44, nominating Herbert Hoover and Thomas E. Dewey, respectively. The Democrats held court (or rink) at the United Center in 1996, renominating Bill Clinton in their first Convention in Chicago since the disaster of 1968.
Blue Line to Illinois Medical District (which can also be used to access the site of West Side Park II and ER), or Green or Pink Line to Ashland-Lake.
* Site of Chicago Coliseum. There were 2 buildings with this name that you should know about. One hosted the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where William Jennings Bryan began the process of turning the Democratic Party from the conservative party it had been since before the Civil War into the modern liberal party it became, a struggle that went through the Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt years before it finally lived up to its promise under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
But it was best known as a site for political conventions. Both parties met there in 1952 (The Republicans nominating Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Democrats the man was then Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson), the Democrats in 1956 (Stevenson again), the Republicans in 1960 (Richard Nixon), and, most infamously, the Democrats in 1968 (Hubert Humphrey), with all the protests. The main protests for that convention were in Grant Park and a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, one of the convention headquarters (now the Chicago Hilton & Towers. 720 S. Michigan).
The Amphitheatre, torn down in 1999, was at 4220 S. Halsted Street, where an Aramark plant now stands. Red Line to 47th Street. This location is definitely not to be visited after dark; indeed, unless you're really interested in political history, I'd say, if you have to drop one item from this list, this is the one.
* Northwestern University. Chicago's Big Ten school is just north of the city, 16 miles from the Loop, in Evanston. Dyche Stadium/Ryan Field, and McGaw Hall/Welsh-Ryan Arena, are at 2705 Ashland Avenue between Central Street and Isabella Street. (Purple Line to Central.)
While Northwestern's athletic teams have traditionally been terrible, the school has a very important place in sports history: The 1st NCAA basketball tournament championship game was held there in 1939, at Patten Gymnasium, at 2145 Sheridan Road: Oregon defeated Ohio State. The original Patten Gym was torn down a year later, and the school's Technological Institute was built on the site. Sheridan Road, Noyes Street and Campus Drive. Purple Line to Noyes.
Welsh-Ryan, under the McGaw name, hosted the Final Four in 1956: Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, soon to be Boston Celtics stars, led the University of San Francisco past Iowa. These are the only 2 Final Fours ever to be held in the Chicago area.
* DePaul University. Led by legendary coach Ray Meyer, and then his son Joey Meyer, the basketball team at this "mid-major" Catholic school has featured eventual pro stars George Mikan, Bill Robinzine, Mark Aguirre, Terry Cummings, Dallas Comegys, Quentin Richardson and Rod Strickland.
The Blue Demons' longtime home court was Alumni Hall, until 1979. It was demolished in 2000, and DePaul's new student center was built on the site. 1011 W. Belden Avenue. Red Line to Fullerton. Starting in 1980, they moved out to the Rosemont Horizon, now the Allstate Arena, in the suburb of Rosemont, out by O'Hare Airport. The WNBA's Chicago Sky also played there from 2010 to 2017. 6920 N. Mannheim Road. Blue Line to Rosemont, then Bus 223 to Touhy & Pace.
Last Autumn, they moved into the new 10,387-seat Wintrust Arena, at the McCormick Place Convention Center. The Chicago Sky of the WNBA also moved in. 2201 S. Indiana Avenue, at Cermak Road. Green Line to Cermak-McCormick Place.
* SeatGeek Stadium. Formerly Toyota Park, MLS' Chicago Fire have played here since 2006, and the National Women's Soccer League's Chicago Red Stars since their inception in 2009. The U.S. soccer team has played here once, a 2008 win over Trinidad & Tobago. 7000 S. Harlem Avenue, Bridgeview, in the southwestern suburbs. Orange Line to Midway Airport, then transfer to the 379 or 390 bus.
* UIC Pavilion. On the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, this 6,972-seat arena opened in 1982. It was the 1st home of the Chicago Sky, from 2006 to 2009. 525 S. Racine Avenue, on the West Side. Blue Line to Racine.
* Arlington Park. Now officially named Arlington International Racecourse, this track, with a 41,000-seat grandstand, has been the Chicago area's leading horse racing facility since it opened in 1927. Jimmy Jones, the Hall of Fame trainer of 1948 Triple Crown winner Citation, and late 1950s Kentucky Derby winners Iron Liege and Tim Tam, said, "Arlington Park became the finest track in the world, certainly the finest I've ever been on."
In the spirit of Chicago's tendency toward innovation, Arlington Park was the 1st track to install a public address system, hiring horse racing's top radio announcer of the time, Clem McCarthy, to speak over it. It added the sport's 1st electronic tote board and clock in 1933, the 1st photo finish camera in 1936, and the 1st electric starting gate in 1940. One of the earliest televised major horse races was held there in 1955, with Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes winner Nashua defeating Kentucky Derby winner Swaps.
In 1973, hoping to lure Triple Crown winner Secretariat to the Midwest, the track's owners created the Arlington Invitational. It worked: Secretariat's owner, Penny Chenery, accepted the challenge, and Secretariat won the race. The race was renamed the Secretariat Stakes the following year, and is still run.
On August 31, 1981, it hosted the 1st thoroughbred race with a $1 million payout, the Arlington Million. That may not sound like a big deal today, but in 1981, when horse racing was a lot bigger than it is now, and an athlete earning $1 million in a season was a new phenomenon, it was huge. (With inflation, that $1 million would be worth about $2.7 million today.) John Henry was the winner, with Bill Shoemaker aboard.
A fire burned down the original 1927 grandstand in 1985, and the track reopened in 1989. In the interim, its meets were moved to Hawthorne Race Course in Stickney, home of the Illinois Derby. It shut down again from 1998 to 2000, for a renovation that allowed it to host the 2002 Breeders' Cup.
* Wrigley Field. Opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park for the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, the Cubs moved in for the 1916 season and have been here for a century. William Wrigley Jr. bought the team and the ballpark in 1925 and renamed it Wrigley Field.
It's known for its brick wall surrounding the field, the ivy covering the bricks in the outfield, the trapezoidal bleachers, the big hand-operated scoreboard on top, and famously refusing to add lights until 1988, playing all day games. The Cubs have won 6 Pennants here, but the last was in 1945. The Bears played here from 1921 to 1970, winning 8 NFL Championships in the pre-Super Bowl era. Wrigley (still known as Cubs Park) was also home of the Chicago Tigers, who played in the NFL only in its 1st season, 1920.
It is by far the oldest ballpark in the National League, and next to Fenway Park in Boston the 2nd-oldest in Major League Baseball. 1060 W. Addison Street. Red Line to Addison.
Wrigley Field in its football setup
* Guaranteed Rate Field. Home of the White Sox since 1991, they've made the Playoffs 4 times since, including winning the 2005 World Series. 333 W. 35th Street at Shields Avenue (a.k.a. Bill Veeck Drive), off the Dan Ryan Expressway. Red Line to Sox-35th.
It was originally named the new Comiskey Park, and then U.S. Cellular Field in 2003. On November 1, 2016, the naming rights to the stadium were sold, and it became Guaranteed Rate Field. No more "The Cell," it's "The Rate" or "G-Rate." Yeah, I know, not the best thing to do while the other major league team in town is playing in the World Series.
* Site of old Comiskey Park. The longtime home of the White Sox, 1910 to 1990, was at 324 W. 35th Street at Shields Avenue (a.k.a. Bill Veeck Drive), and is now a parking lot, with its infield painted in.
The NFL's Chicago Cardinals played there from 1922 to 1959, and the franchise, now the Arizona Cardinals, won what remains their only NFL Championship Game (they didn't call 'em Super Bowls back then) there in 1947. The Chicago Sting of the old North American Soccer League played there from 1980 to 1982, won the league title in 1981 and 1984, and hosted the 1st leg of Soccer Bowl '84.
Comiskey Park hosted 3 fights for the Heavyweight Championship of the World: Joe Louis winning the title by knocking out "Cinderella Man" Jim Braddock on June 22, 1937; Ezzard Charles defeating Jersey Joe Walcott for the title vacated by Louis' retirement on June 22, 1949; and Sonny Liston knocking out Floyd Patterson to take the title on September 25, 1962.
The two ballparks side-by-side, during construction in 1990
* Previous Chicago ballparks. The Cubs previously played at these parks:
State Street Grounds, also called 23rd Street Grounds, 1874-77, winning the NL's 1st Pennant in 1876, 23rd, State, and Federal Streets & Cermak Road (formerly 22nd Street), Red Line to Cermak-Chinatown.
Lakefront Park, also called Union Base-Ball Grounds and White-Stocking Park (the Cubs used the name "Chicago White Stockings" until 1900, and the AL entry then took the name), 1878-84, winning the 1880, '81 and '82 Pennants, Michigan Avenue & Randolph Street in the northwest corner of what's now Millennium Park, with (appropriately) Wrigley Square built on the precise site. Randolph/Wabash or Madison/Wabash stops on the Loop.
West Side Park I, 1885-91, winning the 1885 and '86 Pennants, at Congress, Loomis, Harrison & Throop Streets, now part of the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Blue Line to Racine.
South Side Park, 1891-93, just east of where the Comiskey Parks were built.
West Side Park II, 1893-1915, winning the 1906 and 1910 Pennants and the 1907 and 1908 World Series, the only World Series the Cubs have ever won, at Taylor, Wood and Polk Streets and Wolcott Avenue, now the site of a medical campus that includes the Cook County Hospital, the basis for the TV show ER, Pink Line to Polk. (Yes, the CTA has a Pink Line.)
Prior to the original Comiskey Park, the White Sox played at a different building called South Side Park, at 39th Street (now Pershing Road), 38th Street, & Wentworth and Princeton Avenues, a few blocks south of the Comiskey Parks.
* United Center and site of Chicago Stadium. From 1929 to 1994, the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks played at Chicago Stadium, "the Madhouse on Madison," at 1800 W. Madison Street at Wood Street. The NBA's Bulls played there from 1967 to 1994. The United Center opened across the street at 1901 W. Madison at Honore Street.
At the old Stadium, the Blackhawks won Stanley Cups in 1934, '38 and '61, and the Bulls won NBA Titles in 1991, '92 and '93. At the United Center, the Bulls won in 1996, '97 and '98 and the Blackhawks won the 2010 and '13 Cups -- and, as of this writing, have advanced to the Western Conference Finals for the 4th time in the last 6 seasons. The city's 1st NBA team, the Chicago Stags, played there from 1946 to 1950, and reached the 1st NBA Finals there in 1947. It hosted the NCAA Frozen Four in 2017, and hosts the annual Champions Classic, a college basketball season-opening tournament.
Chicago Stadium hosted 4 fights for the Heavyweight Championship of the World: Joe Louis defending the title by knocking out Harry Thomas on April 4, 1938; Ezzard Charles defending the title by defeating Light Heavyweight Champion Joey Maxim on May 30, 1951; Rocky Marciano defending the title he'd won from Jersey Joe Walcott the year before by knocking Walcott out in the 1st round on May 15, 1953; and Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore, the last man Marciano beat before his retirement vacated the title, facing Olympic champion Floyd Patterson, with Patterson winning, on November 30, 1956.
The Democrats had their Convention at Chicago Stadium in 1932, '40 and '44, nominating Franklin D. Roosevelt each time; the Republicans also had their Convention there in '32 and '44, nominating Herbert Hoover and Thomas E. Dewey, respectively. The Democrats held court (or rink) at the United Center in 1996, renominating Bill Clinton in their first Convention in Chicago since the disaster of 1968.
Elvis Presley gave concerts at Chicago Stadium on June 16 and 17, 1972; October 14 and 15, 1976; and May 1 and 2, 1977 -- meaning he was singing while
* Site of Chicago Coliseum. There were 2 buildings with this name that you should know about. One hosted the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where William Jennings Bryan began the process of turning the Democratic Party from the conservative party it had been since before the Civil War into the modern liberal party it became, a struggle that went through the Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt years before it finally lived up to its promise under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
It was here that Bryan gave the speech for which he is most remembered, calling for the free coinage of silver rather than sticking solely to the gold standard: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
Now a part of Jackson Park, at 63rd Street & Stony Island Avenue. 63rd Street Metra (commuter rail) station.
The other was home to every Republican Convention from 1904 to 1920. Here, they nominated Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, William Howard Taft in 1908 and 1912, Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 and Warren Harding in 1920. When TR was maneuvered out of the nomination to return to office at the 1912 Convention, he held his subsequent Progressive Party Convention was also held there.
It was also the original home of the Blackhawks, from 1926 to 1929 and briefly again in 1932. In 1935, roller derby was invented there. In 1961, an NBA expansion team, the Chicago Packers, played there, becoming the Zephyrs in 1962 and moving to become the Baltimore Bullets in 1963 (and the Washington Bullets in 1973, and the Washington Wizards in 1997).
The Coliseum hosted a few rock concerts before the Fire Department shut it down in 1971, and it was demolished in 1982. The Soka Gakkai USA Culture Center, a Buddhist institute, now occupies the site. East side of Wabash Avenue at 15th Street, with today's Coliseum Park across the street. Appropriately enough, the nearest CTA stop is at Roosevelt Avenue, on the Red, Yellow and Green Lines.
* Site of International Amphitheatre. Home to the Bulls in their first season, 1966-67, and to the World Hockey Association's Chicago Cougars from 1972 to 1975, this arena, built by the stockyards in 1934, was home to a lot of big pro wrestling cards. Elvis sang here on March 28, 1957. The Beatles played here on September 5, 1964 and August 12, 1966.
* Site of International Amphitheatre. Home to the Bulls in their first season, 1966-67, and to the World Hockey Association's Chicago Cougars from 1972 to 1975, this arena, built by the stockyards in 1934, was home to a lot of big pro wrestling cards. Elvis sang here on March 28, 1957. The Beatles played here on September 5, 1964 and August 12, 1966.
But it was best known as a site for political conventions. Both parties met there in 1952 (The Republicans nominating Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Democrats the man was then Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson), the Democrats in 1956 (Stevenson again), the Republicans in 1960 (Richard Nixon), and, most infamously, the Democrats in 1968 (Hubert Humphrey), with all the protests. The main protests for that convention were in Grant Park and a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, one of the convention headquarters (now the Chicago Hilton & Towers. 720 S. Michigan).
The Amphitheatre, torn down in 1999, was at 4220 S. Halsted Street, where an Aramark plant now stands. Red Line to 47th Street. This location is definitely not to be visited after dark; indeed, unless you're really interested in political history, I'd say, if you have to drop one item from this list, this is the one.
Elvis also sang in Illinois at Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois in Champaign on October 22, 1976, and at Southern Illinois University Arena in Carbondale on October 27.
* Northwestern University. Chicago's Big Ten school is just north of the city, 16 miles from the Loop, in Evanston. Dyche Stadium/Ryan Field, and McGaw Hall/Welsh-Ryan Arena, are at 2705 Ashland Avenue between Central Street and Isabella Street. (Purple Line to Central.)
While Northwestern's athletic teams have traditionally been terrible, the school has a very important place in sports history: The 1st NCAA basketball tournament championship game was held there in 1939, at Patten Gymnasium, at 2145 Sheridan Road: Oregon defeated Ohio State. The original Patten Gym was torn down a year later, and the school's Technological Institute was built on the site. Sheridan Road, Noyes Street and Campus Drive. Purple Line to Noyes.
Welsh-Ryan, under the McGaw name, hosted the Final Four in 1956: Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, soon to be Boston Celtics stars, led the University of San Francisco past Iowa. These are the only 2 Final Fours ever to be held in the Chicago area.
* DePaul University. Led by legendary coach Ray Meyer, and then his son Joey Meyer, the basketball team at this "mid-major" Catholic school has featured eventual pro stars George Mikan, Bill Robinzine, Mark Aguirre, Terry Cummings, Dallas Comegys, Quentin Richardson and Rod Strickland.
The Blue Demons' longtime home court was Alumni Hall, until 1979. It was demolished in 2000, and DePaul's new student center was built on the site. 1011 W. Belden Avenue. Red Line to Fullerton. Starting in 1980, they moved out to the Rosemont Horizon, now the Allstate Arena, in the suburb of Rosemont, out by O'Hare Airport. The WNBA's Chicago Sky also played there from 2010 to 2017. 6920 N. Mannheim Road. Blue Line to Rosemont, then Bus 223 to Touhy & Pace.
Last Autumn, they moved into the new 10,387-seat Wintrust Arena, at the McCormick Place Convention Center. The Chicago Sky of the WNBA also moved in. 2201 S. Indiana Avenue, at Cermak Road. Green Line to Cermak-McCormick Place.
* UIC Pavilion. On the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, this 6,972-seat arena opened in 1982. It was the 1st home of the Chicago Sky, from 2006 to 2009. 525 S. Racine Avenue, on the West Side. Blue Line to Racine.
* Arlington Park. Now officially named Arlington International Racecourse, this track, with a 41,000-seat grandstand, has been the Chicago area's leading horse racing facility since it opened in 1927. Jimmy Jones, the Hall of Fame trainer of 1948 Triple Crown winner Citation, and late 1950s Kentucky Derby winners Iron Liege and Tim Tam, said, "Arlington Park became the finest track in the world, certainly the finest I've ever been on."
In the spirit of Chicago's tendency toward innovation, Arlington Park was the 1st track to install a public address system, hiring horse racing's top radio announcer of the time, Clem McCarthy, to speak over it. It added the sport's 1st electronic tote board and clock in 1933, the 1st photo finish camera in 1936, and the 1st electric starting gate in 1940. One of the earliest televised major horse races was held there in 1955, with Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes winner Nashua defeating Kentucky Derby winner Swaps.
In 1973, hoping to lure Triple Crown winner Secretariat to the Midwest, the track's owners created the Arlington Invitational. It worked: Secretariat's owner, Penny Chenery, accepted the challenge, and Secretariat won the race. The race was renamed the Secretariat Stakes the following year, and is still run.
On August 31, 1981, it hosted the 1st thoroughbred race with a $1 million payout, the Arlington Million. That may not sound like a big deal today, but in 1981, when horse racing was a lot bigger than it is now, and an athlete earning $1 million in a season was a new phenomenon, it was huge. (With inflation, that $1 million would be worth about $2.7 million today.) John Henry was the winner, with Bill Shoemaker aboard.
A fire burned down the original 1927 grandstand in 1985, and the track reopened in 1989. In the interim, its meets were moved to Hawthorne Race Course in Stickney, home of the Illinois Derby. It shut down again from 1998 to 2000, for a renovation that allowed it to host the 2002 Breeders' Cup.
This past September, Arlington Park was closed, and the Chicago Bears agreed to buy property, with the intention of building a new stadium on the site. But it won't be opening anytime soon, and it may take the entire decade of the 2020s to sort everything out, build, and open. 2200 W. Euclid Avenue in Arlington Heights, 25 miles northwest of the Loop. METRA commuter rail from Ogilive Transportation Center (formerly Northwestern Station) to Arlington Park.
* National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame. Appropriately in Chicago's Little Italy, west of downtown, it includes a state of Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio. Other New York native or New York-playing baseball players honored include Joe Torre, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Billy Martin, Vic Raschi, Tony Lazzeri, Dave Righetti, Frank Crosetti, Roy Campanella, Sal Maglie, Mike Piazza, Bobby Valentine, John Franco, Carl Furillo, Frank Viola, Jim Fregosi, Ralph Branca, Rocky Colavito, broadcaster Joe Garagiola, and the last active player to have been a Brooklyn Dodger, Bob Aspromonte, and his brother Ken Aspromonte. 1431 W. Taylor Street at Loomis Street. Pink Line to Polk.
* Museums. Chicago's got a bunch of good ones, as you would expect in a city of 3 million people. Their version of New York's Museum of Natural History is the Field Museum, just north of Soldier Field. Adjacent is the Shedd Aquarium. On the other side of the Aquarium is their answer to the Hayden Planetarium, the Adler Planetarium.
And they have a fantastic museum for which there is no real analogue in New York, though the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is similar: The Museum of Science & Industry, at 57th Street & Cornell Drive, near the University of Chicago campus; 56th Street Metra station. The Art Institute of Chicago is their version of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 111 S. Michigan Avenue, just off the Loop.
* Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If you're a fan of that movie, as I am (see my 25th Anniversary retrospective, from June 2011), not only will you have taken in Wrigley Field, but you'll recognize the Art Institute as where Alan Ruck focused on Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Other sites visited by Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world, 1,454 feet, 233 S. Wacker Drive (yes, the name is Wacker), Quincy/Wells station in the Loop; and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 335 S. La Salle Street, LaSalle/Van Buren station in the Loop. (That station is also where Steve Martin & John Candy finally reached Chicago in another John Hughes film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles). The von Steuben Day Parade goes down Lincoln Avenue every September, on or close to the anniversary of Baron von Steuben's birth, not in the spring as in the film.
While the Bueller house was in Long Beach, California, the Frye house is in Highland Park, north of the city. Remember, it's a private residence, and not open to the public, so I won't provide the address. And the restaurant, Chez Quis, did not and does not exist.
Nor did, nor does, Adam's Ribs, a barbecue joint made famous in a 1974 M*A*S*H episode of the same title. Today, there are 18 restaurants in America named Adam's Ribs, including two on Long Island, on Park Boulevard in Massapequa Park and on the Montauk Highway in Babylon; and another on Cookstown-Wrightstown Road outside South Jersey's Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base. But only one is anywhere near Chicago, in Buffalo Grove in the northwestern suburbs.
Not far from that, in the western suburbs, is Wheaton, home town of football legend Red Grange and the comedic Belushi Brothers, John and Jim. John and Dan Aykroyd used Wrigley Field in The Blues Brothers, and Jim played an obsessive Cubs fan in Taking Care of Business. Their father, an Albanian immigrant, ran a restaurant called The Olympia Cafe, which became half the basis for John's Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name, better known as the Cheeseburger Sketch: "No hamburger! Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger... No fries, chips!... No Coke, Pepsi!"
Don Novello, an SNL writer who played Father Guido Sarducci, said the other half of the inspiration was the Billy Goat Tavern, originally operated by Greek immigrant William "Billy Goat" Sianis, originator of the supposed Billy Goat Curse on the Cubs, across Madison Street from Chicago Stadium, from 1937 until 1963. At that point, Sianis moved to the lower deck of the double-decked Michigan Avenue, since it was near the headquarters of the city's three daily newspapers, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the now-defunct Daily News. Mike Royko, who wrote columns for each of these papers, made it his haunt and frequently mentioned it in his columns.
Novello and Bill Murray, Chicagoans, were regulars at the Billy Goat, but John Belushi later said he'd never set foot in the place, so while the others may have drawn inspiration from it, his came from his father's restaurant.
Sam Sianis, nephew of the original Billy, still serves up a fantastic cheeseburger (he was there when I visited in 1999), he deviates from the sketch: No Pepsi, Coke. It's open for breakfast, and serves regular breakfast food. It looks foreboding, being underneath the elevated part of Michigan Avenue, and a sign out front (and on their website) says, "Enter at your own risk." But another sign says, "Butt in anytime." 430 N. Michigan Avenue, lower deck, across from the Tribune Tower. Red Line to Grand. The original location near Chicago Stadium has effectively been replaced, at 1535 W. Madison Street.
Speaking of Saturday Night Live: The sketch "Bob Swerski's Superfans" debuted on January 12, 1991. It was written by Robert Smigel, a Chicago native, who played Carl Wollarski. Chris Farley (from Madison, Wisconsin, so he was a Green Bay Packers fan in real life) played Todd O'Connor, Mike Myers (from Toronto and an Argonauts fan, but had already begun the suburban-Chicago-based Wayne's World sketch) played Pat Arnold, and Chicago native Joe Mantegna played Bill Swerski, a name based on Chicago sportscaster Chuck Swirsky.
Mantegna played Bill only once, and then Chicago native George Wendt, a.k.a. Norm on Cheers, took over as Bill's brother Bob. The premise was that Bob hosted a talk show from Mike Ditka's Restaurant in downtown Chicago, and Carl, Todd and Pat would talk about "Da Bears" and "Da Bulls," exaggerating the strengths of these iconic franchises, not to mention stretching out the S's at the end, and stretching vowels everywhere in the classic Chicago accent, which is so similar to the New York/North Jersey accent, that when I first visited Chicago not long before the sketch first aired, I didn't notice any accent. ("Da Cubs" were mentioned once. There was never a mention of "Da Sox" or "Da Blackhawks.")
All wore big bushy mustaches like Ditka. All but Wendt wore sunglasses like Ditka usually wore on the sidelines. All drank beer and ate Polish sausages during the sketch. And Farley, as Todd, always had a heart attack, but recovered. After Farley's death in 1997, the sketch was canceled.
The Tribune Tower is a work of art in itself. Its building, Tribune publisher "Colonel" Robert R. McCormick, had stones taken from various famous structures all over the world: The Palace of Westminster in London, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon. (He must've paid a lot of people off.) These can be seen at near ground level, but the building itself is so grand that it doesn't need it.
The building is also the headquarters of the TV and radio station that McCormick named for his paper: WGN, "The World's Greatest Newspaper," a line that has long since disappeared from the paper's masthead. 435 N. Michigan Avenue. Red Line to Grand.
The Wrigley Building is right across from it, at 400 N. Michigan. The block of North Michigan they're on is renamed Jack Brickhouse Way, and Brickhouse's statue is on the grounds of the Tribune Tower.
George Halas is buried at St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery. 6800 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Niles, 14 miles northwest of the Loop. Blue Line to Jefferson Park Transit Center, then transfer to Bus 270. Sid Luckman is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, 18 miles northwest of the Loop. Red Line to Paulina & Howard Terminal, then transfer to Bus 97. Visiting the final resting places of Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski and Walter Payton would be understandable, but Grange and Payton were cremated, and Nagurski is buried in his hometown in Minnesota.
* Decatur. A city of 72,000 people, 182 miles south of the Loop, 40 miles east of the State Capitol in Springfield, 50 miles southwest of the University of Illinois in Champaign, and 118 miles northeast of downtown St. Louis, this was the birthplace of the Bears, as the Decatur Staleys in 1920.
Staley Field was located adjacent to the headquarters of the Staley company, at 2200 East Eldorado Street. Retail space is on the site now, including a building hosing the Staley Credit Union.
* National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame. Appropriately in Chicago's Little Italy, west of downtown, it includes a state of Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio. Other New York native or New York-playing baseball players honored include Joe Torre, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Billy Martin, Vic Raschi, Tony Lazzeri, Dave Righetti, Frank Crosetti, Roy Campanella, Sal Maglie, Mike Piazza, Bobby Valentine, John Franco, Carl Furillo, Frank Viola, Jim Fregosi, Ralph Branca, Rocky Colavito, broadcaster Joe Garagiola, and the last active player to have been a Brooklyn Dodger, Bob Aspromonte, and his brother Ken Aspromonte. 1431 W. Taylor Street at Loomis Street. Pink Line to Polk.
* Museums. Chicago's got a bunch of good ones, as you would expect in a city of 3 million people. Their version of New York's Museum of Natural History is the Field Museum, just north of Soldier Field. Adjacent is the Shedd Aquarium. On the other side of the Aquarium is their answer to the Hayden Planetarium, the Adler Planetarium.
And they have a fantastic museum for which there is no real analogue in New York, though the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is similar: The Museum of Science & Industry, at 57th Street & Cornell Drive, near the University of Chicago campus; 56th Street Metra station. The Art Institute of Chicago is their version of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 111 S. Michigan Avenue, just off the Loop.
* Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If you're a fan of that movie, as I am (see my 25th Anniversary retrospective, from June 2011), not only will you have taken in Wrigley Field, but you'll recognize the Art Institute as where Alan Ruck focused on Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Other sites visited by Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world, 1,454 feet, 233 S. Wacker Drive (yes, the name is Wacker), Quincy/Wells station in the Loop; and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 335 S. La Salle Street, LaSalle/Van Buren station in the Loop. (That station is also where Steve Martin & John Candy finally reached Chicago in another John Hughes film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles). The von Steuben Day Parade goes down Lincoln Avenue every September, on or close to the anniversary of Baron von Steuben's birth, not in the spring as in the film.
While the Bueller house was in Long Beach, California, the Frye house is in Highland Park, north of the city. Remember, it's a private residence, and not open to the public, so I won't provide the address. And the restaurant, Chez Quis, did not and does not exist.
Nor did, nor does, Adam's Ribs, a barbecue joint made famous in a 1974 M*A*S*H episode of the same title. Today, there are 18 restaurants in America named Adam's Ribs, including two on Long Island, on Park Boulevard in Massapequa Park and on the Montauk Highway in Babylon; and another on Cookstown-Wrightstown Road outside South Jersey's Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base. But only one is anywhere near Chicago, in Buffalo Grove in the northwestern suburbs.
Not far from that, in the western suburbs, is Wheaton, home town of football legend Red Grange and the comedic Belushi Brothers, John and Jim. John and Dan Aykroyd used Wrigley Field in The Blues Brothers, and Jim played an obsessive Cubs fan in Taking Care of Business. Their father, an Albanian immigrant, ran a restaurant called The Olympia Cafe, which became half the basis for John's Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name, better known as the Cheeseburger Sketch: "No hamburger! Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger... No fries, chips!... No Coke, Pepsi!"
Don Novello, an SNL writer who played Father Guido Sarducci, said the other half of the inspiration was the Billy Goat Tavern, originally operated by Greek immigrant William "Billy Goat" Sianis, originator of the supposed Billy Goat Curse on the Cubs, across Madison Street from Chicago Stadium, from 1937 until 1963. At that point, Sianis moved to the lower deck of the double-decked Michigan Avenue, since it was near the headquarters of the city's three daily newspapers, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the now-defunct Daily News. Mike Royko, who wrote columns for each of these papers, made it his haunt and frequently mentioned it in his columns.
Novello and Bill Murray, Chicagoans, were regulars at the Billy Goat, but John Belushi later said he'd never set foot in the place, so while the others may have drawn inspiration from it, his came from his father's restaurant.
Sam Sianis, nephew of the original Billy, still serves up a fantastic cheeseburger (he was there when I visited in 1999), he deviates from the sketch: No Pepsi, Coke. It's open for breakfast, and serves regular breakfast food. It looks foreboding, being underneath the elevated part of Michigan Avenue, and a sign out front (and on their website) says, "Enter at your own risk." But another sign says, "Butt in anytime." 430 N. Michigan Avenue, lower deck, across from the Tribune Tower. Red Line to Grand. The original location near Chicago Stadium has effectively been replaced, at 1535 W. Madison Street.
Speaking of Saturday Night Live: The sketch "Bob Swerski's Superfans" debuted on January 12, 1991. It was written by Robert Smigel, a Chicago native, who played Carl Wollarski. Chris Farley (from Madison, Wisconsin, so he was a Green Bay Packers fan in real life) played Todd O'Connor, Mike Myers (from Toronto and an Argonauts fan, but had already begun the suburban-Chicago-based Wayne's World sketch) played Pat Arnold, and Chicago native Joe Mantegna played Bill Swerski, a name based on Chicago sportscaster Chuck Swirsky.
Mantegna played Bill only once, and then Chicago native George Wendt, a.k.a. Norm on Cheers, took over as Bill's brother Bob. The premise was that Bob hosted a talk show from Mike Ditka's Restaurant in downtown Chicago, and Carl, Todd and Pat would talk about "Da Bears" and "Da Bulls," exaggerating the strengths of these iconic franchises, not to mention stretching out the S's at the end, and stretching vowels everywhere in the classic Chicago accent, which is so similar to the New York/North Jersey accent, that when I first visited Chicago not long before the sketch first aired, I didn't notice any accent. ("Da Cubs" were mentioned once. There was never a mention of "Da Sox" or "Da Blackhawks.")
All wore big bushy mustaches like Ditka. All but Wendt wore sunglasses like Ditka usually wore on the sidelines. All drank beer and ate Polish sausages during the sketch. And Farley, as Todd, always had a heart attack, but recovered. After Farley's death in 1997, the sketch was canceled.
The Tribune Tower is a work of art in itself. Its building, Tribune publisher "Colonel" Robert R. McCormick, had stones taken from various famous structures all over the world: The Palace of Westminster in London, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon. (He must've paid a lot of people off.) These can be seen at near ground level, but the building itself is so grand that it doesn't need it.
The building is also the headquarters of the TV and radio station that McCormick named for his paper: WGN, "The World's Greatest Newspaper," a line that has long since disappeared from the paper's masthead. 435 N. Michigan Avenue. Red Line to Grand.
The Wrigley Building is right across from it, at 400 N. Michigan. The block of North Michigan they're on is renamed Jack Brickhouse Way, and Brickhouse's statue is on the grounds of the Tribune Tower.
George Halas is buried at St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery. 6800 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Niles, 14 miles northwest of the Loop. Blue Line to Jefferson Park Transit Center, then transfer to Bus 270. Sid Luckman is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, 18 miles northwest of the Loop. Red Line to Paulina & Howard Terminal, then transfer to Bus 97. Visiting the final resting places of Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski and Walter Payton would be understandable, but Grange and Payton were cremated, and Nagurski is buried in his hometown in Minnesota.
* Decatur. A city of 72,000 people, 182 miles south of the Loop, 40 miles east of the State Capitol in Springfield, 50 miles southwest of the University of Illinois in Champaign, and 118 miles northeast of downtown St. Louis, this was the birthplace of the Bears, as the Decatur Staleys in 1920.
Staley Field was located adjacent to the headquarters of the Staley company, at 2200 East Eldorado Street. Retail space is on the site now, including a building hosing the Staley Credit Union.
* Rockford. Nearly 90 miles to the northwest of the Loop, this city, with a population of about 150,000, might be the basis for the fictional town of Lanford on the TV series Roseanne and The Conners. It was home to the rock band Cheap Trick.
Sports-wise, the Rockford IceHogs are the Blackhawks' top farm team, playing at the 6,200-seat BMO Harris Bank Center, known from its 1981 opening until 2011 as the Rockford MetroCentre. In the 1st year of major league baseball, 1871, the Rockford Forest Citys played in the National Association. They had nowhere near enough money, and folded after a single 4-21 season. They played at the Agricultural Society Fair Grounds. A park with a gazebo is now on the site. 900 Jefferson Street, corner of Kilburn Avenue, at the western edge of downtown, by the Rock River. Bus 2.
Much more recently, but not all that recent anymore, the city was home to the Rockford Peaches, of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, from 1943 to 1954. This team, dramatized in the 1992 film A League of Their Own, won Pennants in 1945, 1948, 1949 and 1950. They played at Beyer Stadium, which stood from 1913 to 1990, and was named for a local high school coach. There is once again a baseball field on the site. 245 15th Avenue, about 2 miles south of downtown. Bus 17.
The 5,000-seat Douglas Park was the home of the Rock Island Independents from 1907 to 1925, including 1920 to 1925 in the NFL. In fact, it was the site of the 1st NFL game, on October 3, 1920, a 45-0 Indys win over the Indiana-based Muncie Flyers. It was also home to a minor-league baseball team, the Rock Island Islanders, from 1907 to 1937, winning Class D Pennants in 1907, 1909 and 1932. West side of 10th Street between 15th and 18th Avenues in Rock Island, 180 miles west of Chicago.
One of the oldest surviving pro basketball teams is the Atlanta Hawks. They began as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks (they dropped Bettendorf from the "Quad Cities" description) in 1946. They weren't very good, and moved to Milwaukee in 1951, St. Louis in 1955, and Atlanta in 1968. They played at the 6,000-seat Wharton Field House, which opened in 1928 and still stands. 1800 20th Avenue.
There is a minor-league baseball team in the Quad Cities, but it's been known by various names since its inception in 1879 as the Davenport Brown Stockings. They've won 10 Pennants, previously in Class B, and in what's now Class A: In 1914, 1933 and 1936 as the Davenport Blue Sox; in 1949 as the Davenport Pirates; in 1968 and 1971 as the Quad City Angels; In 1979 as the Quad City Cubs; in 1990 again as the Quad City Angels; and in 2011 and 2013 under their current name, the Quad Cities River Bandits.
Since 1931, they have played at a stadium right on the Mississippi River, which proved a problem during the 1993 flood. The 4,024-seat ballpark was known as Municipal Stadium until 1971, then as John O'Donnell Stadium until 2008, when it became Modern Woodmen Park, as the fraternal organization bought naming rights. 209 S. Gaines Street in Davenport.
No President has ever come from Chicago, and none has a Presidential Library anywhere near it -- yet. Barack Obama has spent his adult life in Chicago, as a lawyer, law professor, and, famously "community organizer," before being elected to the Illinois State Senate, the U.S. Senate, and the Presidency in 2008 and 2012. Since he taught at the University of Chicago, his Library is being built there, at 6201 S. Stony Island Avenue. 63rd Street Station on the South Shore commuter line. It is scheduled to open in 2021.
Abraham Lincoln's Presidential Library is 200 miles away, in the State capital of Springfield. Many other Presidents have Chicago connections. Most notably, the 1st true Presidential Debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, was held on September 26, 1960, at the old CBS Studio, home to WBBM, 780 on your AM dial and Channel 2 on your TV. 630 N. McClurg Street. The building is no longer there. Red Line to Grand, then an 8-minute walk.
In the early days of American politics, any temporary meeting structure was called a "Wigwam," which is a Native American word for a temporary dwelling. Chicago's 1st Wigwam was at what is now 191 N. Upper Wacker Drive, right where the Chicago River splits into north and south branches. Abraham Lincoln was nominated there at their 1860 Convention. A modern office building is on the site today. Clark/Lake station in the Loop.
Another Wigwam stood at 205 East Randolph Street, in what was then called Lake Park, now Grant Park. The Democrats held their Convention there in 1892, nominating Grover Cleveland for the 3rd time. The Harris Theater is on the site today. Randolph/Wabash station in the Loop.
In 1864, the Democrats nominated General George B. McClellan at The Amphitheatre, 1100 South Michigan Avenue. A Best Western Hotel is on the site today. Red Line to Roosevelt. In 1868, the Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant at Crosby's Opera House, 1 West Washington Street. A modern office building is on the site today. Blue Line to Washington.
The Interstate Industrial Exposition Building, a.k.a. the Glass Palace, was where the Republicans met and nominated James Garfield in 1880, and both parties met in 1884, the Republicans nominating James G. Blaine and the Democrats nominating Cleveland for the 1st time. 111 South Michigan Avenue. The aforementioned Art Institute of Chicago is on the site today. Adams/Wabash station in the Loop. And in 1888, the Republicans met at the Auditorium Building, 430 South Michigan Avenue. It still stands. Harold Washington Library station, a.k.a. State-Van Buren station, in the Loop.
The old Cook County Courthouse, where the Black Sox trial took place in 1921 (and where a boy allegedly called out to Shoeless Joe Jackson, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" which may actually have happened) was at 1340 South Michigan Avenue, corner of 14th Street. The building has been replaced by an office building, with an Italian restaurant named Giordano's on the ground floor. Green, Orange or Red Line to Roosevelt.
You may notice some other film landmarks. The Chicago Board of Trade Building was used as the Wayne Tower in Christopher Nolan's Batman films. And Chicago stood in for Metropolis in the Superman-themed TV series Lois & Clark, with the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower as standout landmarks.
And the film about the alternately stormy and supportive relationship between late 1960s Bears running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, Brian's Song, was long said -- usually jokingly, sometimes not -- to be the only film a red-blooded American man could watch and be allowed to cry.
As far as I can tell, Chicago has never been a setting for a soap opera, but 2 have been set in fictional Illinois locations: As the World Turns in Oakdale, and Another World in Bay City (not to be confused with the city of the same name in Michigan). On The West Wing, White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry was from Chicago.
You may notice some other film landmarks. The Chicago Board of Trade Building was used as the Wayne Tower in Christopher Nolan's Batman films. And Chicago stood in for Metropolis in the Superman-themed TV series Lois & Clark, with the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower as standout landmarks.
And the film about the alternately stormy and supportive relationship between late 1960s Bears running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, Brian's Song, was long said -- usually jokingly, sometimes not -- to be the only film a red-blooded American man could watch and be allowed to cry.
Chicago seems to lend itself well to TV dramas: Crime, legal and medical. Crime dramas set there include The Untouchables, about Eliot Ness and his Depression-era crimebusters; the 1960s period piece Crime Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Angel Street, Due South and Chicago Code. Legal dramas include Reasonable Doubts, Boss and The Good Wife.
The setting of the cop TV show Hill Street Blues was never explicitly stated onscreen, but there was much to show that it was obviously Chicago: The skyline, the elevated railways and expressways, the lousy weather, and the police cars with "METRO POLICE" on the doors were obviously patterned after Chicago's, saying, "CHICAGO POLICE."
At the start of the 1994-95 TV season, competing hospital shows aired: ER on NBC lasted a whopping 15 seasons, while Chicago Hope on CBS lasted 6; it lost the competition, but was hardly a loser. Oddly, CBS had previously aired a sitcom titled E/R, set in a Chicago hospital, but it only lasted the 1984-85 season. Starting in 2012, NBC began airing shows of producer Dick Wolf's "One Chicago" Franchise: Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med (hospital) and Chicago Justice
(prosecutors). In 2020, a crossover between them revealed that CBS' New York-based "The FBIs" franchise exists in the same universe as "One Chicago" and Wolf's earlier Law & Order franchise.
Other shows set in Chicago include Good Times, set in the infamous, now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing project; Punky Brewster; the related sitcoms Perfect Strangers and Family Matters (Great shows? Well, of course, they were, don't be ridiculous!); Married... with Children, Fox's longest-running non-cartoon (though the Bundy family was pretty darn cartoonish); the fantasy series Early Edition; the TV version of Soul Food; Steve Harvey's sitcom The Steve Harvey Show (not to be confused with his current talk show); According to Jim, starring Wheaton, Illinois native Jim Belushi; the inaptly named (it was, after all, a comedy) Andy Richter Controls the Universe; Mike & Molly, a sitcom about a cop and his teacher girlfriend; the Disney Channel teen sitcom Shake It Up; Shameless; and, perhaps most classically, The Bob Newhart Show, with Bob as psychiatrist Dr. Bob Hartley.
Roseanne, its recent reboot, and its post-Roseanne "threeboot," The Conners, have been set in Lanford, Illinois, a fictional small town near Chicago, perhaps too working-class to be called a "suburb."
Nearly every one of these shows was actually filmed in Los Angeles, and the exterior shots were also mostly L.A. sites, so don't bother going to look for them. However, a statue of Newhart is at the Navy Pier, near its amusement rides, between Grand Avenue & Illinois Street at the lake.
The setting of the cop TV show Hill Street Blues was never explicitly stated onscreen, but there was much to show that it was obviously Chicago: The skyline, the elevated railways and expressways, the lousy weather, and the police cars with "METRO POLICE" on the doors were obviously patterned after Chicago's, saying, "CHICAGO POLICE."
At the start of the 1994-95 TV season, competing hospital shows aired: ER on NBC lasted a whopping 15 seasons, while Chicago Hope on CBS lasted 6; it lost the competition, but was hardly a loser. Oddly, CBS had previously aired a sitcom titled E/R, set in a Chicago hospital, but it only lasted the 1984-85 season. Starting in 2012, NBC began airing shows of producer Dick Wolf's "One Chicago" Franchise: Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med (hospital) and Chicago Justice
(prosecutors). In 2020, a crossover between them revealed that CBS' New York-based "The FBIs" franchise exists in the same universe as "One Chicago" and Wolf's earlier Law & Order franchise.
Other shows set in Chicago include Good Times, set in the infamous, now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing project; Punky Brewster; the related sitcoms Perfect Strangers and Family Matters (Great shows? Well, of course, they were, don't be ridiculous!); Married... with Children, Fox's longest-running non-cartoon (though the Bundy family was pretty darn cartoonish); the fantasy series Early Edition; the TV version of Soul Food; Steve Harvey's sitcom The Steve Harvey Show (not to be confused with his current talk show); According to Jim, starring Wheaton, Illinois native Jim Belushi; the inaptly named (it was, after all, a comedy) Andy Richter Controls the Universe; Mike & Molly, a sitcom about a cop and his teacher girlfriend; the Disney Channel teen sitcom Shake It Up; Shameless; and, perhaps most classically, The Bob Newhart Show, with Bob as psychiatrist Dr. Bob Hartley.
Roseanne, its recent reboot, and its post-Roseanne "threeboot," The Conners, have been set in Lanford, Illinois, a fictional small town near Chicago, perhaps too working-class to be called a "suburb."
Nearly every one of these shows was actually filmed in Los Angeles, and the exterior shots were also mostly L.A. sites, so don't bother going to look for them. However, a statue of Newhart is at the Navy Pier, near its amusement rides, between Grand Avenue & Illinois Street at the lake.
As far as I can tell, Chicago has never been a setting for a soap opera, but 2 have been set in fictional Illinois locations: As the World Turns in Oakdale, and Another World in Bay City (not to be confused with the city of the same name in Michigan). On The West Wing, White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry was from Chicago.
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Every American should visit Chicago. Da Bears are one of North American sports' great franchises. Have fun -- but remember, be smart, and don't go out of your way to antagonize anyone.