“Boystown was a much younger crowd,” she said.
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“It was a place where I learned how to be a participant in gay culture instead of just a voyeuristic looker in,” she said.īradshaw said while gay bars have existed in Chicago for a long time in predominantly LGBT neighborhoods such as Boystown, Charmers was a “gay outpost” at the edge of the city. “It was like a real community place where you just came to see people.”īradshaw said Charmers was the first bar she’d gone to after she had come out as lesbian. “It was like our living room … you didn’t go there to get loaded,” Bradshaw said.
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Melissa Bradshaw, a professor in the English department at Loyola who’s been a resident of Rogers Park for 20 years, said she used to frequent Charmers in the 1990s and early 2000s until its closing.
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The TV played old movies, Animal Planet and ’90s NBC Sitcom Will and Grace, setting itself apart from the typical sports games broadcasted in most bars. Manship’s art deco sculptures adorned the walls of the bar. The interior of Charmers was long and narrow, and had an old school record music box which usually blared obscure music from the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society The two women in charge of the place named it Charmers, the name being “a nod” to Chalmers, Sullivan said.Ĭhalmers, Peppers and Charmers have all had identities as gay bars, according to Sullivan.Ī famous sculptor named Paul Manship - who’s known for his sculpture of Prometheus which sits in a fountain at the Rockefeller Center in New York City - created art deco figurines of mythical Greek characters for the original Chalmers, which sat in the space until Charmers closed more than 70 years later. “I was a little kid then, and I remember it.” “He put a huge, eight-foot high, neon colored champagne glass hanging off the building, and that was Peppers for years, all through the 70s,” Sullivan said. Sullivan said when Pete Chalmers died, his wife managed it for a while, but after she died, they sold it to a man who opened up a bar called Peppers in the space. “It became really kind of, underground famous because it was one of the only gay bars in the city of Chicago,” Sullivan said. In the space, Pete Chalmers opened the bar and named it Chalmers. Sullivan said in the 1930s, his great grandfather rented the unit - which was just part of the building owned by Sullivan’s family - to a Greek family with the last name Chalmers. 15 years later, the bar’s legacy is still strong.ĭan Sullivan, the owner of the building Charmers once sat in, said the property has been in his family since his great grandparents built it in 1915. The place closed in the early 2000s after the death of the bar’s last owner in 2004.
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The establishment, which was sandwiched between a bodega and a liquor store, was known as a gay bar, but it was also considered a neighborhood spot for people of all identities. and was the neighborhood haunt for many who lived in Rogers Park.
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Behind uninviting blacked out windows and a barred entrance, once upon a time, existed a tiny bar in Rogers Park which fostered relationships and memories to last a lifetime.Ĭharmers used to sit at 1502 W.