Drink Here Long Enough and They’ll Give You the Bar
At the Old Town Ale House, one of Chicago's finest drinking establishments, the regulars are immortalized in an elaborate, ever-evolving gallery of portraits, all the work of Bruce Elliott—tavern keeper, painter, golf hustler, anarchist.
CHICAGO READER / NOV 2006
Of the more than 125 portraits that Bruce Elliott has painted of regulars at the Old Town Ale House, one of his favorites is of a friend named Howie Grayck. It took Elliott a long time to get it right: he finishes most of his portraits in a few days, but Grayck’s took more than three weeks. “I almost threw it in the garbage,” Elliott says. “He’s a real sweet guy. Everyone loves him. He always has a smile, but he’s got a certain sorrowful look. There’s a sad quality to it. It’s real elusive, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”
After struggling with the painting one day, Elliott decided to sleep on it. When he returned the next morning to his studio in Hyde Park he fiddled with the eyes and smile until finally the face on the cardboard looked like Howie being Howie: a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, a brow like a moon, an ample mustache, and big, dark, soft eyes, smiling like a boozy father during the last hour of his daughter’s wedding reception.
Elliott, 66, has been drinking at the Ale House regularly for nearly 45 years, and for the past four and a half he’s been painting the portraits of his fellow barßies that now cover nearly every inch of wall space there. But last year his stake in the place went from purely emotional to financial: he and his wife, Tobin Mitchell, an administrator for the Dolton school district in suburban Riverdale, took over the business from longtime owner Beatrice Klug, who’d fallen ill with cancer in 2004. (She died in August of last year.) Elliott and Mitchell were old friends with both Beatrice and her ex-husband, Ale House barkeep Arthur Klug, who’d died of a heart attack in January 2005. Shortly after he died, Beatrice bequeathed the place to Elliott and Mitchell on one condition: that they remain adamantly opposed to change. Aside from the ever-increasing mass of Elliott’s artwork on the walls, they’ve kept their word. They fix chairs instead of replacing them and allow nothing but jazz on the jukebox: Beatrice Klug once dated a roadie and joined him on a Rolling Stones tour, after which she refused to listen to rock music for the rest of her life….