Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [20]
I was thinking about all of this as I passed under the El. As I slipped between its massive iron legs, a train hurtled overhead, as if to say: ‘Look what you’re capable of. Look at this.’ It really is a magic noise – the sound of trains right in the middle of town. I bet the wee boys in Chicago just love it. I reckon they’re crazy about it. But not everyone’s as jolly and happy about the El as I am. Way back in 1892, the New York Academy of Medicine claimed that ‘the elevated trains prevented the normal development of children, threw convalescing patients into relapses and caused insomnia, exhaustion, hysteria, paralysis, meningitis, deafness and death. And pimples on the willy.’
I’m sure you can guess which of those ailments I added to the list.
Continuing on down Adams Street on the trike, I was enjoying every yard of it. The concrete canyons, where you have to look straight up to see the sky, are really amazing to ride along. But I was soon twisting and turning to follow Route 66 out of the Windy City, passing down streets and avenues with names like Ogden, Cicero, Nerwyn, Harlem and Lyons. I think a lot of people are a bit disappointed when they discover that Route 66 isn’t just one long, straight road but all broken up into various chunks and sections.
Not so long ago, in the days of prohibition, these outer parts of Chicago were once undershot with a spider’s web of tunnels used by gangsters and bootleggers to distribute their wares to the speakeasies. Chicago is such a beautiful town these days – good and interesting and clean and lovely – and the city authorities now seem very embarrassed by all that Al Capone stuff from the 1920s and 1930s. When you ask them about it, they say, ‘Well, it was a long time ago. It was a period we’d rather just put behind us … blah-di-blah-di-blah.’ But the truth is that the prohibition era was one of the most interesting periods in Chicago’s history, which is why we stopped to investigate it. I reckon you have to go to a speakeasy if you’re in Chicago, so we did.
The American government made a criminal mistake in the late 1910s, when it bowed to pressure from the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and enacted legislation to shut down boozers everywhere. Can you believe it: every bar in America was shut. For thirteen long years, until 1933, it was illegal to make, sell or transport alcohol. As a result – you know everybody needs a wee drinkypoo – speakeasies sprang up everywhere.
Everyone imagines every speakeasy had a wee hole in the door. You know, knock twice, wait for the wee hole to open just a whisker, whisper, ‘Joe sent me,’ and sneak inside. But there were thirty thousand of them in New York alone – twice the number of bars there had been before the ban on booze came into effect in January 1920 – so there was no such thing as a standard speakeasy.
The one we visited in Chicago was on Wabash Street, not far south of Adams Street and the start of Route 66. It’s now a very good restaurant called Gioco, but you can still see remnants from its prohibition days, when the front was a restaurant but the rear was a boozer that became more and more secretive, and much more interesting, the further back you ventured.
Something many people don’t realise about that period in America is that, in the midst of all that prohibition, you were allowed to brew a hundred gallons of beer and fifty gallons of wine in your own house, but you couldn’t sell it. No one was allowed to distil hard liquor, but that didn’t stop the bootleggers. They called it bathtub gin in northern cities like Chicago. In the rural southern states it was known as moonshine.
Even though people were allowed to make all the beer and wine they could possibly drink at home, they still