By Ben Joravsky
Rosen’s father, Sam, opened the family’s first tavern at Chicago and Ashland, not far from their three-room Humboldt Park flat. In the early 50s Sam moved the tavern to Yondorf Hall at North and Halsted. After getting out of the army, Rosen began helping his father run the business. That was in 1957; he’s been there ever since. “Lincoln Park was much different than it is today,” he says. “It was a working-class neighborhood, and we had the roughest bar in America with the meanest dudes. It wasn’t a fancy liquor store; they didn’t have liquor stores like that back then. You had a bar and a little package store. We had some holdups, and yeah, I had to break up some fights. We were selling pints of wine to the bums. In the winter they stayed outside on the corner warming their hands over fires they were burning in barrels.”
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Sometime in the early 70s, local real estate prices began rising and wealthier customers started stopping by. Realizing he could make good money accommodating their thirst for foreign wines and expensive spirits, Rosen closed the tavern and hired a wine salesman. “We kept our wines in the cellar,” he says. “We called our customers cellar rats. They hauled up their own cases.”
“But you know something, as aggravating as that was, it worked out well. It made us famous. After that everyone had heard of Sam’s. We were on TV, and the Sun-Times ran an editorial cartoon [mocking the proposed loan]; I stuck it on the wall. The bond deal was killed, but so what? If we had got it we’d still be over at North and Halsted and the store would be overcrowded by now.”
There were politicians, police officers, and preservationists among the crowd that congregated last week at the Uptown Theater to celebrate the grand old palace’s latest return from the dead.
Langer won’t say exactly how much he paid Weitzman for the Uptown; but most educated guesses put it in the mid six figures, which means Weitzman’s either very smart or everyone else is very dumb.
“I’m kicking myself for not doing that,” he said with a rueful smile.
