Illinois’ Nazi Brewers?: Was Pilsen’s Schoenhofen Brewery A Front?

Old bars gather within them unwritten histories of the neighborhoods that surround them, the stories collected like the odd assortment of bric-a-brac and brewery paraphernalia covering walls and filling the corners. And just as these objects sometimes feel like an eerie fit for the place—just why are all those Oddfellows banners hanging on the wall near the headless light-up altar boys—so the tales do not always align with one’s impression of the neighborhood. There’s something about these histories that just doesn’t ring true, and, given the circumstances under which they circulate (at the bar a few drinks in), suspicions often feel justified.

One of my favorite bars in Chicago, the Skylark, abounds in such stories—all of them as intriguing as they are difficult to verify. Longtime neighborhood residents claim that prior to serving its current youngish, hip clientele, the bar catered to the needs of Mexican transvestites and called it-self Club International. But then others have claimed the Mexican transvestite bar was situated across the street where there’s now a tacqueria. Newspapers confirm that the Skylark was formerly known as Cozee’s Corner and run by a Hungarian, before that, Kaufmann’s Tavern where you could cash your check at the end of the workweek (the place made the papers only when someone held it up). The bar has elegantly-shaped Olympian mounts of porcelain in the men’s room that some claim are the oldest functioning urinals in Chicago, but how does one prove that? The Skylark entered the historical record in 1910 as a Birk Brothers Brewing Company tied-house (which were kind of like the fast food-chain equivalent of bars, selling solely the products of a particular brewery). The evidence for this is concrete, literally: the “B” carved into the façade was pointed out to me by For-gotten Chicago’s Jacob Kaplan.

Birk Brothers dates to 1891 and once operated out of 2117 N. Wayne Avenue, an industrial area near the intersection of Southport and Clybourn. It closed in 1950, having weathered Prohibition. For a time, during a period of expansion when need exceeded the capacity to produce, it made use of the Schoenhofen Brewery’s facilities. The remains of that Schoenhofen Brewery are mere blocks away from the Sky-lark. Schoenhofen is also at the center of one of the oddest stories I ever heard told at the bar.

It goes something like this: back in the thirties or perhaps early forties, the brewery served as a front for the German Nationalist Socialist party, aka Nazis. A guy who walks his dogs daily past the old brewery building told me this, claiming that he’d heard it from multiple people who’d lived in the area all their lives. What’s more, a sculpture of a giant beer bottle—which survived the war years but not into the present—concealed radio equipment used by Nazi spies and saboteurs. It’s an unlikely but not impossible story. Chicago has historically had a large ethnic-German population, and there were probably a few brownshirters thrown into the mix long before Frank Collin came to town. As I read through old newspaper stories, I realized that there was a tinge of truth to the tale, not quite as colorful as the stories currently whispered around the grounds of the defunct brewery, but interesting nonetheless.

Here’s what we can agree upon: German immigrant Peter Schoenhofen started his brewery in 1860 at the corner of 12th and Jefferson before moving it to 18th and Canalport. It remained in the family until 1924. Material traces, like the Birk Brothers “B” on the side of the Skylark, remain to corroborate these simple facts. Two of the Schoenhofen buildings that you can still see today reflect different eras in the brewery’s history. The 1886 administration building, by architect Adolf Cudell, sports the Brewer’s Star on its façade. A mark of professionalism and purity, it is reflective of late nineteenth century tastes, while the sleek and modern powerhouse designed by Schmidt, Garden, & Martin dates from 1902. Another true story is that both buildings appear in The Blues Brothers (1980) when Jake and Ellwood drive through the alley between them on their way to the fictional St. Helen of the Blessed Shroud orphanage.

Along with a few other smaller buildings, the administrative offices and the powerhouse are all that survive of what was once a beer-making city-within-the-city consisting of seventeen structures. The brewery reached peak production in 1910, churning out 1.2 million barrels of tasty, frothy brew. Its most popular brand was Edelweiss, heralded as the “Pure Food Beer,” which drinkers were told in a 1908 Chicago Tribune advertisement to “drink with [their] meals—it aids digestion.” Edelweiss’s purported purity derived from the fact that it was made from artesian water, from the wells located beneath the brewery itself.

How could something so wholesome become linked to nefarious Nazi spies? First off, the Schoenhofen brewery did come under suspicion during a war. It was World War I, not World War II, when the American Protective League, a forerunner to our present-day Tea Party Patriots, began to question the loyalty of the owner, Count Oscar Bopp von Oberstadt. Bopp had married old Peter Schoenhofen’s daughter Elizabeth, emigrating from Deutschland to take over operation of the brewery. Advocating US neutrality and peace, Bopp showed obvious sympathies to the Kaiser. On December 9, 1918, the Tribune reported a raid by US marshals and the APL on the Count’s estate in Woodstock, a suburb of Chicago where Groundhog Day (1993), starring Bill Murray, was shot.

Which reminds me, did you know that the role for Peter Venkman, played by Murray in Ghostbusters was originally written for John Belushi, who played “Joliet” Jake Blues? That’s the sort of fact you pick up in a bar. What you don’t hear are stories like the one about the raid on Bopp’s country estate; I mean, who even remembers anything about the First World War in Chicago, where even the mayor, William Hale Thompson, was pro-German and, in another old yarn, threatened to punch King George V of England in the nose should His Highness ever turn up on State Street? Just as Thompson never got his wish, the Woodstock raid didn’t turn up anything more incriminating than 100 iron-bound, securely locked trucks, which the family chaufer, also a Hun, claimed contained “clothing and household things.” The marshals did not locate the suspected “powerful wire-less apparatus,” but the government nevertheless seized the brewery. The Schoenhofen family spent the better part of a decade seeking restitution.

The Woodstock raid and the seizure of the brewery during World War I are, I believe, the sources of the neighborhood story about Nazi spies. Or maybe not—there’s no way to know for certain how these stories start. Maybe some old-timer, upon the brewery’s closing, mentioned something about the Schoenhofen family spying for the Germans and the person seated next to him at the bar thought the guy meant Nazi Germans, which is an entirely understandable mistake. Or maybe some kids, growing up near the brewery in the years after the war, saw the Brewer’s Star, which closely resembles the Star of David, and, being kids, got all the details wrong but spread the story nonetheless. WWII Nazi spies are easier to hate than WWI Kaiser sympathizers, who probably made up a decent portion of the neighbor-hood’s residents at the time. For a story as local lore to resonate, to survive so many conversations in a bar or out on the sidewalk, it needs to have sharp edges, as clearly carved as the Brewer’s Star or that “B,” with none of the points softened by moral ambiguity.

Chicagoans should commend the Schoenhofen Brewery for its contributions to local culture rather than be wary of its past. During Prohibition, the brewery tapped those same artesian wells and called forth into the world a carbonated soda that tasted like lime Jell-O and left the drinker’s tongue an emerald hue. In 1919 the Schoenhofen Brewery created Green River, which for a brief moment rivaled Coke in popularity. Today it is consumed primarily around St. Patrick’s Day, when the Chicago River matches its color and new stories emerge from the consumption of immense quantities of beer, to follow a current all their own.