Division Street (Chicago)
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- "Division Street" redirects here. For other uses, see Division Street (disambiguation).
| Division Street |
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| 1200 North | |
| Direction: | East-West |
|---|---|
| Major cities: | Chicago |
Division Street is a major east-west street in Chicago, Illinois, located at 1200 North (one and a half miles north of Madison Street). Division Street begins in the Gold Coast neighborhood near Lake Shore Drive, passes through Polonia Triangle at Milwaukee Avenue into Wicker Park and continues to Chicago's city limits and into the city's western suburbs.
Division Street serves as one of Chicago's main club strips, with hip bars and clubs lining much of the street from Lake Michigan west to Clark Street, and is pushing even further west towards the north branch of the Chicago River. The center of activity of this stretch, however, is located between State Street and Dearborn Avenue. Combined with the upscale nightlife scene along Rush Street (a diagonal road leading northwest out of downtown Chicago) several blocks to the south, the area serves as central Chicago's 2nd major nightlife hub, second only to the River North entertainment district, located north of the Chicago River, and west of the famed Michigan Avenue shopping district. The area's bars and clubs stay open very late, with most closing 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock in the morning. The street is usually very crowded and busy, and after 3 AM, Chicago police usually block off the street to vehicular traffic due to the heavy pedestrian presence. Further to the west, however, Division serves areas of the city that are not as economically vibrant, continuing a pattern of social class division noted by author Studs Terkel in his book, Division Street: America. Division Street has a Red Line stop at Clark/Division. Division Street is also served by the Division/Milwaukee stop on the Blue Line.
On the north side of this street, two doors to the east of Dearborn Avenue, one can find a bar called, "Mother's", which has become a minor part of US folklore. "Mother's" gained some prominence in the U.S. as a result of the 1986 film, "About Last Night...," retaining it to the present day. The film was based on the 1974 play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," by David Mamet, (which was set in the subculture to be found in the intersecting Rush Street and Division Street bars, at the time), and focused on a group of characters who frequented the bar in question, portraying the corrosive effects of the subculture on relations within it.
The exterior shots were, indeed, of the real bar, though the interior shots were done elsewhere, the real Mother's being far more cramped than the place seen in the movie, with interrupted lines of sight that wouldn't have allowed for some of the wide shots seen in the film. Mother's is located in a basement, with many support pillars through its unusually-shaped space, due to the proximity of the tunnel for the Red Line train and its air intake shafts.
Farther west, around Damen Avenue (2000 W), there are a number of upscale restaurants, shops, and bars which are very popular in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Wicker Park, East Village and Ukrainian Village.
This neighborhood also figured prominently in the 1977 film, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."
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