Schaller's Pump

The History

Schaller's Pump opened in 1881 at 3714 S Halsted Street in the Bridgeport neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The Schaller family established the tavern in an era when neighborhood saloons were the social centers of working-class life — the places where immigrants gathered after long shifts in the stockyards and factories that surrounded Bridgeport. The bar held Chicago Liquor License #6, one of the first issued by the city, compared to The Berghoff's famous License #1. For 136 years, through the administrations of over twenty mayors, Schaller's Pump poured drinks and hosted the conversations that shaped Chicago.

Bridgeport was not just any neighborhood. It was the neighborhood — the one that produced five Chicago mayors, more than any other community in any American city. The most powerful of them was Richard J. Daley, "Boss" Daley, who served as mayor from 1955 to 1976 and is widely regarded as the most powerful mayor in American history. Daley was born in Bridgeport, raised in Bridgeport, and lived in Bridgeport his entire life, even as mayor. His son, Richard M. Daley, followed the same path, serving as mayor from 1989 to 2011. Schaller's Pump sat at the center of this political universe. It was the unofficial headquarters of the 11th Ward Democratic organization, the machine within the Machine. On election nights, precinct captains gathered at Schaller's to count votes, deliver results, and celebrate victories that were often decided long before the polls opened.

The bar survived Prohibition by operating as a "soft drink parlor" — a fiction that fooled approximately no one. It survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, the race riots of 1919, the political upheavals of the 1960s, and the complete economic transformation of the South Side. Through all of it, Schaller's Pump remained what it had always been: a corner tavern where Bridgeport came to drink, argue, mourn, and celebrate. The building at 3714 S Halsted was finally sold in 2017, and the bar closed after 136 years of continuous operation.

What Made It Famous

Schaller's Pump was where Chicago politics happened — not in the offices at City Hall, not in the newsrooms of the Tribune or the Sun-Times, but in a tavern on Halsted Street where the precinct captains and ward committeemen did the real work of running the city. For over a century, the bar was the living room of the Bridgeport Democratic organization. Deals were made over beer. Loyalties were tested. Favors were traded. The patronage system that powered the Chicago machine for generations ran through places like Schaller's, where the relationship between politics and neighborhood life was so intimate that they were essentially the same thing.

Richard J. Daley — "Boss" Daley, the man who built modern Chicago, hosted the 1968 Democratic Convention, and ruled the city with an iron fist for 21 years — was a Bridgeport native who reportedly visited Schaller's regularly. The bar was part of the fabric of his world, the world of Irish-American South Side Chicago, where loyalty to the ward was loyalty to the city was loyalty to the party. When Daley died in 1976, the old order began to crack, but Schaller's endured. When his son Rich took over as mayor in 1989, the bar was still there, still pouring, still hosting the same political conversations in the same booths.

The closure of Schaller's Pump in 2017 marked the end of an era — not just for Bridgeport, but for the old-school, neighborhood-tavern culture that once defined working-class Chicago. The Bridgeport neighborhood had been changing rapidly with gentrification, and the new residents who moved in had little connection to the political traditions that had sustained the bar for over a century. Schaller's Pump was the last of its kind: a place where the past was not a museum exhibit but a living, breathing, drinking reality. When it closed, a piece of Chicago closed with it.

Key Facts