When I lived in Chicagoland, whenever I had the free time, I would always go to my favorite town for garage sales: Skokie. This was back before e-bay, so a lot of folks sold stuff without any clue to their value. I’m not saying that old matchbooks have a lot of value, only that I bought someone’s matchbook collection (over 200 matchbooks) for about $5. About 80% of them were for Chicagoland restaurants and dinner clubs from the 50s through the 80s. It was a history of this particular couple’s traveling and eating life as read through matchbooks. All I can say is that they ate out A LOT, and also stayed at a lot of hotels and motels. Each matchbook represented a slice of history, and a challenge to me to find out if the particular business still existed or had been lost to the vicissitudes of retail success and failure. Today, with the IntarWebs (IW), one can engage in matchbook history and end up in a wormhole of intrigue. Such was the case recently when, just for heck of it, I chose one of the matchbooks and sought to find out what I could about the restaurant from which it originated.
Matchbooks have built-in attributes that help the IW researcher. In the case of the above Grassfield’s International matchbook, my first clue was in the phone number, BRiargate 4-666. People tend to forget (or not know) that phone numbers are veracious indicators of a particular historical period. Back when Ma Bell (AT&T) had a monopoly in phone service, as the number of subscribers kept increasing, they came up with a system to establish phone numbers based on a standardized, alpha-numeric system. It was not until around 1962 that what was called “All Number Calling” became the standard, so I knew that Grassfield’s International had to be a fairly old restaurant. And, of course, the address of 6666 Ridge Avenue would also help me find out about this intriguing restaurant with obviously global associations. Not surprisingly, one of the first things I discovered was through another matchbook:
Rather than the world globe, I was confronted with a big lobster, which made sense considering the inner picture of my matcbook showed a fish on a block of ice.
Seafood was this restaurant’s specialty. At this point I searched that spooky 6666 address. Look at what I found:
So now I was confronted with a similar lobster, awesomely die-cut to extend beyond the boundaries of a standard matchbook, but an entirely different name, Allgauer’s. So that was the next search, and here is what I found:
This postcard of Allgauer’s “Nufer” Restaurant depicted a large establishment at the same 6666 N. Ridge Av. location, and was clearly older than the Grassfield’s matchbooks, so I was confused as to why I discovered the same lobster motif for two different restaurants with the same address. What was going on? So then I was off to Google earth to see if that big Tudor-style building was still there:
Except for the small liquor store at the top of the above image, 6666 N. Ridge no longer refers to the location of Grassfield’s Restaurant. So I then decided to find out more about it by doing a little more IW digging. You will note that the Allgauer’s matchbook above notes two locations, one of which was the 6666 N. Ridge address that got this whole thing started, and another that was “Lincoln at Touhy.’ At this point I found some amazing newspaper articles about that second Allgauer’s restaurant:
Now I was sucked into a mob racket story; pure Chicago-style “protection.” Read some of these articles:
Did the Allgauer’s at 6666 N. Ridge change it’s name to Grassfield’s to prevent more fires? Did it too fall to the mob? Who knows. But it just goes to show that behind every matchbook there ‘s a story. And some nice vintage images on the IW:
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