Chicago: Gold Elevators, Root Beer Floats, & Where Route 66 Begins

Sorry for the delay in posts. While we made it to Chicago just fine, Joe's bag and all of our electronic power arrived five hours later.

After a bit of finagling to convince Thrifty to give us our rental car (note: debit cards are a miserable way to pay for those), we checked into the Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, just steps from where Route 66 begins. Against the backdrop of modern art installations in Millennium Park, the Congress Plaza is a relic from long ago. Opened in 1893, the hotel is the cheapest on Michigan Ave. because of its bubbling wall paper, chipped furniture, and aging ventilation system that struggles to deal with the late-May humidity. We chose Congress Plaza not for its modern luxury, but because it was here when Chicago had cobbled streets and horsedrawn carriages. The hotel's marbled, muraled lobby, gold elevators, and antiques upholstered in red velvet made us feel we'd stepped into history.

Joe can't believe we convinced the small, Russian lady at Thrifty to give us this car.

A few blocks from our hotel, Joe and I gorged ourselves with pierogies, traditional German fare, and homemade root beer floats at Berghoff's Restaurant. Herman Joseph Berghoff, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1870, began brewing Dortmuner-style beer in Fort Wayne in 1887. After selling the beer at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, he opened a café in the city to showcase it (bottles sold for a nickel then). The cafe survived prohibition by selling “near beer,” now Berghoff’s Root Beer, and Herman opened the restaurant in 1989. Berghoff's men's only bar ended in 1969 when seven members of NOW demanded to be served (our hotel is also the founding site of the League of Women Voters). The fourth generation of owners, Carlyn Berghoff, Herman's granddaughter, reopened the restaurant in 2007.

Berghoff's still looks like it probably did in the early 1900s, dressed with stained glass windows, gold-framed photos of the World's Fair, and cocoa-colored furniture. As we sipped our flight of Berghoff beers, we watched dozens of patrons, dressed in their theatre best, come through the doors.

Berghoff's Beer

Today, we begin our road-trip at the intersection of Jackson Boulevard and Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago, where Route 66 begins