A eulogy for Danny’s Tavern

For decades, this cozy candlelit bar in Bucktown nurtured a devoted and welcoming community of music lovers—but it couldn’t survive the pandemic.

By JACOB ARNOLD

Danny’s Tavern, the intimate, candlelit, apartment-shaped bar that’s been a fixture of Chicago nightlife for 34 years, is permanently closed. It’d been shuttered due to the pandemic since March 18, and its owners told sta in early October that it wouldn’t be opening again. Rumors of the closure started circulating on social media midway through last month, and Block Club confirmed the bad news on November 5.

The Bucktown bar was best known for its popular soul, Smiths, and disco nights, but over the years it also hosted obscure electronic music, poetry readings, art installations, live jazz, and much more. Danny’s was an odd space in an unlikely spot—its location at 1951 W. Dickens was on a largely residential block— but its cheap, untrendy drinks and eclectic music reliably attracted large, diverse audiences. It was that rare kind of place that people fell in love with at first sight, where regulars became sta and stayed on for decades.

The bar’s namesake, aspiring power-pop musician Danny Cimaglio, opened Danny’s in 1986 after he and his wife, Barbara, pooled resources with two other couples. It was nearly called Pete & Danny’s Truck Stop, because plumber and bartender Peter Nelson was among the investors.

Bucktown was still a working-class neighborhood, populated largely by first-generation immigrant families. The tavern in a two-flat that became Danny’s had previously been a bakery and then a reputed bookie joint. Bartender Angie Hebda lived upstairs for a time. The downstairs space, the rear of which had previously been an apartment, had small tables and a dartboard.

In 1990, Terry Alexander and Michael Noone, two friends of Nelson’s who tended bar at other establishments, closed a deal to buy Danny’s. They managed it themselves for the first few years, and would soon begin its transformation from a jukebox bar into a showcase for curated music.

“Prior to us buying it, Danny’s had a rockabilly culture and motif to it—a real Elvis Pres- ley kind of bar,” Noone recalls. Since rockabilly wasn’t their scene, Alexander and Noone invited artists to redecorate its rooms, among them photographer and performance artist Sheree Rose, mixed-media artists Ike Hobbs and Martin Giese, and painters Dave Rodman and Tom Billings.

“In the front room, where the bar was, we would have an artist feature his or her work for a couple of months at a time,” Noone says. “The back rooms were permanent installations that we’d switch out every couple of years.” The bathroom, o what would become the dance floor, still had a working tub and shower, which one artist filled with papiermâché sculptures under plexiglass.

“They asked Kenny and I to remake the bar,” Stacy recalls. “They knew that we both had lived in the East Village in the late 80s, the early 90s, and spent a lot of time around bars.”

Stacy and Kordich painted the walls plain colors and dimmed the lighting, relying heavily on tabletop tea lights. They raised the ceiling above the dance floor and knocked down interior walls to open up the space. “At that time, all of those little rooms used to have just one door,” Stacy explains. “If you were in a room with somebody, you kind of owned that room, so we wanted to try to get that notion out of it.”

Finally and most significantly for this new era of Danny’s, Stacy and Kordich replaced the consumer-level stereo Alexander had been using. They hung PA speakers and installed proper DJ equipment, including a pair of Technics 1200 turntables and a Pioneer mixer. Since space was at a premium, DJs had to mix facing the bar, their backs to the dance floor.