Towards the end of his career, Tennessee Williams wrote a play called “Small Craft Warnings,” about a coastal bar where an assortment of characters—male and female artists, homosexuals, blue collar workers, pensioners and drifters—all met and discussed their various lives. A similar drama often takes place at the Dram Shop on weekday mornings. The clientele is a mosaic of Chicago’s old and new North Side: pensioners from the last of the studios and furnished apartments near Diversey, Surf and Pine Grove Avenues; electricians, plumbers and maintenance men “hiding” from their morning rounds or just playing hooky; actors and artists from nearby Boystown and service-industry workers just coming in for a morning “nightcap” after a shift at the clubs. Yet despite the diversity, there are few places where there is more camaraderie, great conversation and general good feeling than in this tiny hole-in-the-wall bar. Why? Because it is not yet ten o’clock, we don’t have to worry about going to work and we already have a buzz, courtesy of the inexpensive and generally strongly poured drinks at the Dram Shop.
