The north-end of Rush Street is an exciting intersection of nightclubs, luxury restaurants and high-end hotels, and also an exciting cauldron of sordid history. Just a five-minute walk from the original Playboy Mansion this hotbed of nightlife action once rivaled Vegas and New York. Nowadays better known as the Viagra Triangle, it is a known pickup spot where golden bachelors will bring out their sports cars and Amex cards to impress much younger, wealth-seeking dates.
Not all of Rush Street’s history is obscene. Once an extension of Green Bay Indian Trail, a native trade route used for thousands of years, Rush Street now takes its name after Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Early residents include William Ogden, first mayor of Chicago, and famed inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick.
By the 1960s, Rush Street was the center of the action. State Street, that Great Street, already began to show signs of fade as decades of organized crime withered it down to a string of peep shows, gambling dens, and other rings of vice. Nearby Rush Street took the mantle as Chicago’s nightlife district, hosting the most exciting acts in the country at Mister Kelly’s Nightclub. If you can name an entertainer, singer, or comedian from the height of the Rat Pack Era, from Ella Fitzgerald to Richard Pyror, they performed at Mister Kelly’s. Today, Gibson’s Steakhouse now sits on the site of the famed nightclub, with the block of Bellevue in front of it now honorary Frank Sinatra way.
But just like State Street, some of Chicago’s vice began to surface on Rush Street. In time, rumors swirled that nearly every spot was tied to organized crime. In 1978, a police raid across ten nightclubs exposed a sophisticated network of organized prostitution across the district:
“Undercover agents found themselves questioned closely once inside the taverns about their hotels… The questions were virtually identical at every tavern… Hidden rooms were available in each tavern to which prostitutes and customers would retire… The similarity between many of the operations may indicate that organized crime is coordinating the prostitution activities in the taverns.”
-Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1978. Just as State Street evolved from a vice district to a quieter but still commercial row, Rush Street has followed in State Street’s footsteps once again. While a summer night in The Triangle still brings its share of people watching, and bartenders certainly have their share of memorable characters and dates shuffling around still, the days of Mister Kelly’s glamor and Playboy’s mark on the character of a district once rivalling Vegas are now but history; in some ways perhaps for the better.
