Goodbye, old friend
NIGHT LIFE | Wrigleyville bar that drew Japanese Americans gets in last cuts
It is not fair for an old man bar to close in the spring.
Especially within the trendy foul lines of Wrigleyville.
(Keith Hale/Sun-Times)
The Nisei Lounge, 3439 N. Sheffield, is the neighborhood's last small tavern where you can walk in after a Cubs game, find a seat and discuss the merits of the team's 1964 pitching rotation. The owners still honor the space for a pool table.
On a warm spring day, an old man will walk into the dark lounge wearing a winter coat and no one will notice. The Nisei is that kind of place.
The Nisei Lounge is for sale.
Owners Scott Martin and Din Papageorgakis have a potential buyer, and regulars are convinced the lounge is as good as gone.
The dive bar is on a piece of property as precious as a healthy Kerry Wood right arm.
At a farewell party for regulars Sunday night, chocolate cupcakes were served. A couple of shots of sake were knocked back for old times' sake. People were misty-eyed. But toward the end of the party, Martin showed up to tell the crowd paperwork for the sale had not been signed.
"I was embarrassed," Martin said Monday. "Sometimes things like this happen in a partnership."
Just ask Carlos Zambrano and Michael Barrett.
Martin bought the Nisei in 1993 with Dave Jemilo of Green Mill jazz club fame. Jemilo later sold his share. Papageorgakis bought his half in 2001. Martin said they've been working on the sale since January.
The Nisei Lounge opened in its current location on the ground floor of Links Hall in 1951. The Nisei are second-generation, American-born children of Japanese immigrants. But the bar has been open to all walks of life. Last year actor Ethan Hawke came into the Nisei while working on a production upstairs at Links Hall. Just last month Johnny Depp wandered into the Nisei after filming nocturnal scenes for his John Dillinger opus in the alley behind the bar.
Kaunch Hirabayashi opened the original Nisei Lounge in 1949 at Clark and Division. When the bar moved to its present location, Chicago was home to more than 150,000 Japanese Americans, about 30,000 of whom had been interned in camps during World War II. Many Lake View-based Japanese Americans since have moved to the suburbs.
"That's how this bar came to be," Martin told me in a 2000 interview. "After the war ended they were back with their families. Having lost all their property by going in the camps, they came to the Midwest to find work. They'd go into a bar after work and the white guys would tell them, 'Get the hell out of here.' "
The Nisei Lounge was a familiar place in a strange land.
The last great Nisei regular was Kenny Kuzuharu, who died last year. He probably saw this coming.
During World War I, Kuzuharu was a member of the all-Japanese 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. Kuzuharu was decorated from head to toe, and fought while his family was interned behind barbed-wire fences in Colorado.
In the autumn of his life, Kuzuharu was a dishwasher at Chester's -- now the Hamburger King, south of the Nisei. At the Nisei he would always sit in the same barstool and order a dollar draft of Hamm's beer. He had a mystical toothless smile punctuated by a white goatee. Sometimes he would gaze into the back bar mirror and see a friendly face.
Only then would he smile.
Kuzuharu was one of the last great wanderers in Wrigleyville, moving like blood from joint to joint. The neighborhood isn't like that anymore.
During the 1980s Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda would hit the Nisei after a Cubs game, and recently retired Cub equipment manager Yosh Kawano was known to stop in for a visit. It's uncanny that the bar is in the verge of closing the year the Cubs introduced Kosuke Fukudome, the team's first Japanese player.
"This bar is full of real people," Philip Peck, 44, said at the "farewell party." The Chicago management consultant has been a regular since 1985, when there were Japanese singles on the jukebox. "You feel the charm. It's like DNA that reeks out of the walls, from the bad bathrooms to the secret door that used to exist [to Raul's International barber shop next door]."
Bartender Jennifer Ream, 32, reported her regulars drink bourbon and Pabst Blue Ribbon. "It's funny now. Because of Fukudome, everyone wants to do sake bombs," she said on Sunday.
Financial journalist Jim Cote is a Nisei regular and has been going to Cubs games since 1977. "It's the last neighborhood bar here," Cote said as he stood near the bar's cork dart boards. "You don't have the drunken frat bums like you do at the other bars. Instead of paying $48 for a bleacher seat, I'd watch the game with the regulars at the Nisei."
A 54-year-old native of Kankakee, Cote has been a Cubs fan since he was 4. "We're trying to figure out where we're going to go," Cote said. "I've gotta go prospecting."
