Simon’s Tavern Turns 90: The Neighborhood May Change, But the Community Is the Same

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I’ve yet to find a satisfactory descriptor for the sort of comfort one feels while sitting in one of Chicago’s real-deal neighborhood taverns. In fairness, the essence of the so-called third place – a meeting ground to build relationships outside of home or work – is not easily captured with one word.

It feels like a brawny hug, like being embraced by the city’s whole egalitarian history, which sweeps me up the moment I enter joints like Rossi’s, Old Town Ale House, L&L Tavern, Skylark, and Simon’s Tavern. It smells like the familiar musk of stale beer mixed with bygone tobacco smoke smudged into the patinaed ceiling. It might squeak or stick a little, like a worn barstool or a decades-old mahogany bar. It sounds like a bartender who’s fluent in friendly banter but don’t take no s--t, and a well-stocked jukebox. You may even feel the presence of ghosts here, of union organizers, politicians, journalists, and immigrants; of marginalized and hard-up Chicagoans who’ve darkened this door and pounded its worn floors long before you, seeking community and a cold one to shake off a long day.

Andersonville’s third place, Simon’s Tavern, turned 90 this year – an increasingly rare milestone for the city’s disappearing old watering holes. Crossing the unassuming threshold beneath the “pickled” herring neon, you’ll find all the usual trappings: a long, mahogany bar; Viking paraphernalia; couches like you’d see in Granny’s basement; one of the city’s best jukeboxes; and the purported, restless specter of a woman. You’ll also feel that indescribable yet familiar warmth. Indeed, whenever Scott Martin, Simon’s current owner, brings his 91-year-old father, Thomas Martin, to the bar, Thomas always says the same thing.

“He says this reminds him of how it used to be, and of the bars he went to when he was younger, and how comfortable he feels here,” Martin says. “How cool is that?”

It’s a common refrain among the regulars and newcomers alike whom Martin has often delighted since taking the reins in 1994. The bar’s third owner (and first outside the Lundberg family), Martin bought Simon’s from Roy Lundberg, who took over when his father, original owner Simon Lundberg, died. Martin dreamt of owning a bar starting in his teens.

“I was either gonna be minister or own a bar,” he says. We’re seated at a worn, wood high-top opposite the bar as we talk, beneath a faded, peeling mural called “The Deer Hunters,” which features Simon alongside the joint’s original regulars – the working-class Swedes from the neighborhood who loved deer hunting as much as a mug of warm glögg.

Martin is a Chicago native, born and raised in the same Andersonville house as his Swedish American mother, Delores Essler. He attended Amundsen High School and went to church at Ebenezer Lutheran, where his mother was the secretary for 26 years. His dad worked for CNW Railroad. When Martin was a child, his parents used to bring him to Simon’s on weekends after church. In his teens, Martin started sneaking in with a friend to buy a couple of 50-cent Old Styles and “get the giggles.” On his twenty-first birthday, his dad brought him in for his first “proper” drink, even though Thomas knew the staff had long since started greeting his son as “Scotty!” When Martin first approached Roy about buying the bar, Roy had no interest in selling. But he soon showed up at the Nisei Lounge, which Martin owned at the time, and they started talking. Roy was sold by Martin’s deep ties to Andersonville.

Simon’s became a legally licensed bar in May, 1934, after operating as an illegal basement speakeasy during the latter years of Prohibition at a time when the neighborhood was a thriving scene for the city’s Swedish community. At this point, Martin asks me if I’d like to tour the old speakeasy, sparing me the nickel fee.

“Ready?” he says, cautioning me to take the narrow wood staircase sideways. He launches into the story he now knows by heart, of how Simon Lundberg emigrated from Sweden in the early 1900s and became a U.S. citizen by fighting in World War I. After the war, he opened a grocery store called the Berwyn Food Shop where Ranalli’s of Andersonville is now located. During Prohibition, Simon got a proposal he couldn’t refuse from local bootleggers: to sell whiskey with his coffee. Soon enough, he was selling much more “coffee” than food – enough that by 1926 he’d earned enough to buy the building at the bar’s current address. To satiate local Swedes who didn’t care for coffee with their whiskey, he opened a speakeasy in the basement called the N.N. Club, which stood for the No Name Club.

“When I have Swedish tour groups, I usually will say it stood for the No Norwegians Club,” Martin says, “and they all chuckle.”

After Prohibition, Lundberg transformed the grocery store into Simon’s Tavern, remodeling it in an Art Deco style and moving his family upstairs. The black door with “N.N. Club Members Only” painted in gold remains downstairs, now leading to an office and storage room. Martin recalls seeing it when Roy took him on a tour of the bar just before handing over the reins.

“As he opens the door and he goes, ‘You have to use your foot.’ See? He’s already giving me instructions!” Martin says. He points to a hulking old desk against the wall. “This is where Roy said, ‘My father sat here, and I sat here, and you should sit here.’ Now I realize I’m going to be the owner of Simon’s.”

Martin loves this part of the story. He becomes almost giddy, like I imagine he was at age 10, when he and a friend finally unriddled what his parents meant whenever they’d say one of their friends was “pickled,” and when he was first captivated by this old place. He recalls asking Roy to describe what the speakeasy was like. At first, Roy dutifully rattled off the particulars: five tables each with four chairs, whiskey in boxes on the floor; the men smoked tobacco and drank and talked politics. But Martin pressed again and again, “No, what was it like?” Suddenly, Roy recalled going downstairs each night to say goodnight to his father.

“The men are still smoking cigarettes and cigars and pipe tobacco and drinking the whiskey,” Martin says. “Now Roy stops and whispers, ‘But now they were speaking of women.’ And I just looked at him. I wanted to hug him. I finally got the nine-year-old boy’s memory and how risqué it was to him.”

Over the past three decades, Martin has tried to preserve Simon’s more than change it. During the pandemic, he and his team installed new floors and rebuilt the foot rail below the bar. Next they’re hoping to restore the murals. As the bar has evolved into a historical artifact, Martin sees as many tourists as regulars on a given day.

“In a way, it is like a museum,” he says. He’s leaned into his role as curator of one of the last vestiges of the neighborhood’s roots. He presides over beloved holidays like Christmas and Midsommarfest in Swedish-themed garb. He brews 15 gallons at a time of housemade glögg using his original recipe – only slightly doctored after since-shuttered Wikström Gourmet Foods’ Ingvar Wikström declared there was too much clove. He slings his glögg in slushy form come summer. In the late ’90s Martin also bought nearby Swedish restaurant Svea from Kurt Matthiasson, founder of the Swedish-American Museum Center. He says Matthiasson noticed the care with which Martin was shepherding Simon’s in a fast-changing neighborhood.

Indeed, many remnants of the neighborhood’s Swedish roots, like Wikström’s and the Swedish Bakery, are long gone, as are many of those who presided over them. The Clark St. corridor still bustles with mom-and-pop shops alongside a growing presence of chain stores and restaurants. But Martin bristles when I ask if he’s worried about the neighborhood’s trajectory.

“The community is still here; it’s as good as it ever was,” he says. “The people make this the best f-----g neighborhood in Chicago. And what’s cool about this bar now is the melting pot it is.”

Among the regulars is lawyer Doug Mraz, who’s been coming to Simon’s since 1998 but became a denizen when he moved to the neighborhood four years ago. 

“When my wife and I moved up here, I needed a local bar,” Mraz says. “I walk in one day, I start talking to the bartender. I’ve come ever since, four to five times a week.”

He likes that it’s not a sports bar, that the small TVs are more likely to feature Turner Classic Movies than a football game. The jukebox is good too, he says, an essential component of a great neighborhood joint. More than anything, though, it’s the people.

“People are talking about all kinds of subjects: movie trivia, music, art,” he says. “It’s very mellow. I come here to chill out. It’s a very soothing place in times of trouble.”

Martin isn’t certain of the bar’s survival as rents and cost of goods continue to climb in the thriving neighborhood, but he’s proud that so many who darken Simon’s door feel at home, if not in a way they can succinctly describe.

“The reason for the bar’s success is the people who work here, the regulars, the people who care about the place well after I do,” he says. “Can it last much longer? Great question. For now, I’m gonna keep honoring Simon’s legacy. In 10 years, it’ll be a hundred-year-old bar in Chicago. How about that?”