Hi, I'm Linnea Dominic, Curious City Intern.

For the past few weeks, we featured neighborhood stories from our archives to coincide with our citywide scavenger hunt.

This week, we look at a Chicago neighborhood institution, the Tavern.

Since the pandemic began, there's been a lot of back and forth about whether to keep bars open and the

different rules for how to do so safely. And some bars have struggled to stay in business after they

were forced to close because of COVID. While the current conversation may be COVID-specific,

debates over the role of bars and communities have been going on for decades. To learn why there are fewer

neighborhood bars than there used to be,

and the role taverns have played in Chicago's communities,

we return to a story from 2019.

Reporter Jake Smith will take it from here.

Patrick McBriardy likes to try out different bars around Chicago.

One bar he liked was Shalers 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?

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.

...