The World Below - a series of tunnels branching underground from the Green Mill to the bookstore Shake, Rattle Read a few doors away - mixes myth and fable, dusty boilers and blood-splattered urinals (more on this in a moment). In the mid-1910s, the Green Mill was an exclusive hangout for Essanay Studio executives and early film stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Wallace Beery. In recent decades, jazz musicians such as Clifford Jordan, Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr.
have graced its stage. But tales of Jazz Age Chicago, when gangsters such as "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn and boss Alphonse Capone defied Prohibition, are most prominent down below. "They could either come to the tunnels and hide, or escape.
Of course, the booze was stashed down here," says Ric Addy, owner of Shake, Rattle Read. The bookstore has been in his family since 1965, which makes Addy an armchair historian and raconteur of all things Uptown. Below the Green Mill, Addy latches the heavy wooden door to the bar with a metal hook and carefully climbs down the steep stairs, ducking his head under the lip of the floor above.
These musty concrete hallways and storage rooms are remnants of a tunnel system used to haul coal in the first part of the 20th Century. The Green Mill end of the tunnel provides the nightclub with its storeroom and cellar. Boxes of beer bottles and mini-pretzels wait to be summoned.
Electrical wires and various pipes slink around the ceiling. Side rooms - cubbyholes said to be the sites of gangster poker games - hold dust-caked bar stools, stacked seat-to-seat, legs reaching for the sky. Around the corner, heading north, through an ominous steel door and down a dark hallway, Addy shines a flashlight on a doorway that, a century ago, would have read "Men.
" Before the massive Uptown Theatre changed the face of Broadway's 4800 block in 1925, the Green Mill hosted a vast beer garden and dance hall, complete with underground restrooms.
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