Chicago's Uptown neighborhood has long been famous for its historic music venues, like the Riviera, the Green Mill, and the Aragon.

Take a walk through Uptown, and you'll find yourself stepping into the nightlife of a distant past, a world of cabarets, movie palaces, and ballrooms.

It's a little strange, if you think about it, why were all these built here so far from

the city center?

Which is exactly what uptown resident Karen Kinderman started wondering.

It was just interesting to me to think about having so many theaters all in one place and thinking

about the vibrancy of having such a place for artists and people to gather. So she asked

Curiosity, why is there such a concentration of theaters in Uptown? And how did it all begin?

I'm reporter Robert Lauselle.

In investigating Karen's question, I discovered the answer has a lot to do with the kinds

of entertainment that were popular a hundred years ago.

But it's also a story about the forces that shape the neighborhood itself, not just those

venues, a history stretching all the way back to the 1800s. Back then, the area we now

call Uptown was just countryside. And the biggest local attraction in those days, cemeteries. In that era,

it was common for Chicagoans to picnic or take walks in cemeteries like Graceland. And when people trekked out from the city

to bury a loved one, they stopped for drinks at nearby saloons. You go see your dead relatives

in the cemetery and then you go have something to eat and go to the tavern, you know. That's Dave

Jamillo, who owns the Green Mill. His jazz club sits in the same spot where one of those first

cemetery wayside was located. When that saloon opened in the 1890s, it was surrounded by farms

and vacant lots. But that began to change in 1900 when the first elevated trains connected

this countryside area with the loop. As historian Angela Schleader explains, that sparked a population boom.

What happened was Wilson Avenue became sort of a center for shopping and restaurants and things,

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