It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Patrick McBriety likes to try out different bars around Chicago. One bar he liked was Schallers Pump in Bridgeport, one of the oldest taverns in the

city. But recently he drove by and noticed it had closed down. It's something he's grown used to.

Some of the favorite bars that I had gone to in the past are not around. And this phenomenon of

disappearing bars,

Patrick suspects it's been going on for a long time.

Because he's heard it said that there was once a tavern on every corner in Chicago,

which is clearly not the case today.

So he came to Curious City to ask.

What changed and why did that happen? I'm reporter Jake Smith. This claim that

Patrick has heard about a long-lost era when the city was stuffed with taverns, maybe it's a bit

of an exaggeration. But there was a time when Chicago had more than 8,000 bars. That's about nine

times as many as today.

And it turns out, their disappearance can tell us a lot about the city's shifting demographics,

how its attitudes towards public drinking have changed, and the lasting influence of a powerful Chicago family.

But first, Patrick and I wanted to know how there got to be so many

bars in the first place. So, naturally, we met up at a tavern. Cheers. It's a shout of the glasses,

right? Just the radio. We sat down with historian Liz Garibet. It turns out there have been not one,

but two different heydays of Chicago taverns.

The first heyday came around 1900. Now, even at this point, there wasn't actually a bar on

every corner, as Patrick had put it, but...

There are certain places where you could have undoubtedly found a tavern on every corner of an

...