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Billy Goat Tavern runs full circle around the city

Editor’s note: This column originally published April 25, 1996

When William Sianis landed in Chicago as an immigrant from Greece, he scrambled for jobs.

In time, he sold newspapers. He sold them on street corners and at a little stand on the West Side.

Sianis then found himself caught in a rough-and-tumble circulation war between the downtown papers. This was back in the 20s when newspaper circulation was a mean business.

Giving away coupons and discounting home delivery didn’t figure into it. Knocking the other guy’s newspapers off the stands did.

And sometimes the owner of the stand got in the way.

Sianis said years later that he was hit by a delivery truck for one of the dailies and that broke his leg. He said it was on purpose. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp and, toward the end, carried a cane.

Sianis opened a saloon in 1934 on West Madison Street near the old Chicago Stadium. The Stadium was a place as tough as the neighborhood. They staged prize fights there and hockey games and, after a long time, basketball games. The crowd was always loud and harsh and, sometimes, drunk. West Side - anything goes.

The West Side is the Best Side. That’s the way the old timers used to say it. They said it with bitter humor because the West Side was always a no-man’s-land caught between the pretenses of the North Side and the sprawling neighborhood ethnic bastions of the South Side.

West Siders rubbed big shoulders against each other in their vest pocket neighborhoods full of Irish and Italian hoodlums, priests and sinners, tenements and bungalows. You can still get a flavor of what the city once was with a careful tour of the old West Side along Jackson Boulevard at Ashland and on Taylor Street, west of UIC, and on Grand Avenue.

Sianis lived on these lawless streets and his saloon was a symbol of the cocksure spirit of the residents. He grew a mustache and little beard and called himself “Billy Goat” because he looked like one. He also kept a real billy goat in the saloon, usually feeding in its pen in the front window.

If the goat was his pet, Billy Goat himself was adopted as a pet of the sports writers who had the West Side Stadium as their beat. At first, they dropped his name into stories to tweak their editors. Then they started devoting columns to him.

William was smart enough to realize that no publicity is bad publicity and he decorated his saloon walls with clippings from the papers. In 1945, he tried to sneak his goat - with attendant newsmen present - into Wrigley Field for the Cubs’ last World Series.

They wouldn’t let the goat in. Billy Goat said he put a curse on the Cubs from that day. In fact, 1945 was their last Series, so maybe the curse worked.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the newspapers downtown shifted alliances. The Daily News was bought by the Sun-Times and abandoned its lovely old building on the river that is the gateway still to thousands of commuters heading across the Madison Street bridge to Northwestern station. The American left Madison Street and joined the Tribune on Michigan Avenue.

All the downtown dailies were within two blocks of each other and the Goat saw his chances - and took them. He moved out of crumbling west Madison Street and opened a basement bar across from Tribune Tower.

That was 1964. It is still there, still in the basement, and still visited by tens of thousands of tourists who have seen the joint made famous on TV (Jay Leno of NBC pays a visit on his current Chicago trip). The walls are covered with press clippings from past days. It is the cheapest bar and grill on the tony street, a piece of the old West Side living its own fantasy downtown.

Billy Goat is dead and they don’t keep a live goat in the place anymore. But Sam Sianis, his nephew, runs it the way Billy wanted it run. The mayor drops in now and then to nosh a “cheeseboiga” and Sam is quite the business man. Like a good Chicagoan, he never forgets where he came from.

And he is going back there. To the West Side. A branch Billy Goat Tavern is being built at Madison and Ogden as we speak. Sam says it will open in August, in time for the convention. Back to the West Side after all these years.

West Siders also say, “What goes around, comes around.” The near West Side of the city is coming back strong in loft condos and rehabbed two-flats and even trendy glitz bars on west Madison like Chelios’.

And now the Billy Goat will be back on West Madison Street.

What goes around, comes around. Maybe the Cubs will even let a goat into Wrigley the next time they win a pennant.

Death of another paper means more jobs lost

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