Green Mill Tavern

As an expatriate Chicagoan, I most strenuously object to the description of the birthplace of slam poetry, the Green Mill Tavern (July 27).

The Green Mill (at the intersection of Broadway and Lawrence on Chicago’s North Side, for those who wish to make the trek) may well be the archetypal Art Deco dive. Besides the weekly poetry slams, live jazz until 4 a.m., cheap beer and a photograph of Al Capone alongside a votive for his tortured soul on the bar’s grand piano are the Green Mill’s primary attractions. Dark, smoky, crowded, loud--all appropriate adjectives. But “beer-soiled confines”? Makes it sound like the men’s room of an abandoned filling station.

Your reporter has obviously spent far too much time in L.A.’s architect/interior decorator-driven concept establishments and far too little time in real American taverns. Do him a favor: Send him back to “Sweet Home Chicago” as frequently as possible in the hope that he may more fully come to appreciate all that is great about real neighborhood saloons.

RUSSELL BURGOS

Los Angeles