Green Mill

History

The Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, at 4802 N. Broadway in Uptown, is Chicago’s best-known jazz club. Wikipedia traces it to Pop Morse’s Roadhouse on the same block in the late 1890s; the current room reopened in 1935 as the Green Mill Tavern after Prohibition. The club is widely tied to Chicago gangland history, including reports that Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn had a financial interest in the 1920s, and it hosted stars such as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Al Jolson. Dave Jemilo bought and revived it in 1986. Live jazz still runs through the week, and the room sits in the Uptown Square Historic District.