I felt this topic deserved its own thread. Jimmy’s was a venerable watering hole even in the early sixties. I expect Robert Maynard Hutchins and William Rainey Harper occasionally drowned their sorrows there. Countless generations of students have most certainly done so. Though most undergrads are under drinking age, there was never any pretense of checking i.d.'s in former days. There seemed to be a notion in that period of sombre undergrad life that a frolicsome night out couldn’t hurt anyone. Frolicsomeness is of course to be understood in the U. of C. style: there was an always intense chess game going near the bar, and existential angst flowed from table to table as copiously as the suds in their pitchers. The odd person (I was one of them) got turfed from the place for overexuberance, but that was a highly prized badge of honor.
No one mentioned this joint in a recent thread on campus eateries, and I don’t suppose it would win any prizes on that front. But is there no respect on this board for tradition? I assert that this is a great Chicago neighborhood bar! And not just any bar but a bar with a difference - the I.Q.'s of its clientele! Well, one might legitimately question whether those allegedly high I.Q.'s are much in evidence on a Saturday night, but let that pass.
Does Jimmy’s still flourish? I would be interested in the observations of the board on this important subject.
I graduated in 2013, so data is a bit old. But it was still doing well back then. That said, most students can only use it it their 4th year (and maybe some of 3rd year) vs. the students that post here seem to be more prospective students, 1st & 2nd years.
Based on stories when I was in school, it sounded like it did lose some momentum over the years.
I will be on campus in early May and will make a point of visiting and writing an update.
When we were touring the campus with my DD, a friend from my college days (ca 1980) who was walking with us casually mentioned that I ‘moved in’ there for a couple of years. The drinking age was lower then.
@ihs76 Please report your findings. It would be a shame, per the observations of CS, if the place is losing out in the popularity sweepstakes to Johnny-come-latelies with better menus but less character. That would be one more nail in the coffin of the old U. of C. What next? No more core?
@HydeSnark I trust your were not hurrying to an early class when so greeted by your ta.
Yes, can confirm, Jimmy’s is still thriving. I have an evening meeting on Thursday for one of my RSOs, and the upperclassmen in the RSO head to Jimmy’s afterwards every Thursday :).
I was in college at the U of C in the early 1980s. One of my high school friends was on spring break at Georgetown and came to visit. We stopped in to Jimmy’s for a beer (the drinking age was 21 by then, but I don’t think a single establishment in Hyde Park ever checked IDs back then. Jimmy, the Tiki Lounge and the Cove sure didn’t.)
We sat down at a little table and were talking, and my friend started looking around with a strange expression on his face. At the table to our left, people were debating something about Hegel vs. Schopenhauer. At the table to our right, they were talking about ancient Sumerian cities and the meaning of the ziggurat. At the bar, a couple of people were breaking down the meter of a poem on a paper napkin. Physics and chemistry talk could be hear from further away. “This place is unbelievable” my friend said. “Georgetown is nothing like this.”
Every time I talk to him, he reminds me of that day.
Does anyone know or care to speculate as to why this quintessential Hyde Park joint bears the name of the community that only begins five blocks south of it? Of course no one actually uses the official name, but still. And, anyway, how odd is it that we all call the place by a name, if memory serves, that doesn’t appear at all on the sign or in the phone book? --While it would take the combined powers of Herodotus and St. Thomas Acquinas to answer these questions I will speculate as follows: The semi-eponymous Jimmy started up the place at a time lost to modern memory when the Woodlawn name had a nice working class sound to it. Indeed, the name was intended to lure that clientele from south of the Midway. But Jimmy made a fatal error - he underestimated the thirsts and habits of U of C students. They began flocking to his joint, blithely ignoring its name and using his in its place. That must have been flattering to him, but with their perennial chess games and disputations on the meaning of meaning the students forever compromised the working stiff vibe Jimmy had sought. He never gave up on his dream, he maintained the original name to the very end but sadly went to his grave still waiting to have a good conversation about the Bears with a guy with callouses on his hands who had no opinion on Aristotle’s definition of the soul.
My impression from my kid – who has been an undergraduate, graduate student, and now employee at the university – is that Jimmy’s is fine, but was never that appealing to him as an undergraduate. It was expensive relative to other options for drinking (i.e., buying cheap booze at Kimbark), and had an “old” atmosphere where, yes, you risked running into your TAs or professors, which wasn’t necessarily what you wanted when you were out drinking with friends. He has gotten into it more as he has aged. However, now when he hangs out in bars with his similarly superannuated UofC friends, the bars are mainly in Logan Square or Wicker Park where all of them live.
Sorry to be so prosaic but is it not because it is on the corner of S Woodlawn Ave and 55th?
@ThankYouforHelp I/we must not have been sitting in the area because that certainly would not have been the conversation at my table :D. Come to think of it, I have no recollection of what we talked about for hours.
@ihs76 Damn, that’s brilliant. It was there in front of our eyes all the time, like the purloined letter, too obvious to see.
It brings home, however, something interesting in my own experience of Hyde Park. I was a big walker of the neighborhood, never before having lived in a large city. Yet the names of the north-south running streets (the avenues) never really stuck much in my head, and certainly not in the way that the east-west streets (the streets proper) did. Perhaps that was because there was a certain uniformity in the feel and texture of the avenues, whereas each of the streets had a special quality of its own. Or maybe it was just easier for a rube like me to remember and classify things by number.
