“I’d always had this dream about owning a neighborhood bar,” Keup says. When Keup, a longtime Far North Side resident, purchased Jackhammer in 2000, it was a gay dive called Numbers. Gay bars have been a part of the building for about 30 years. After the Depression, the building fell upon hard times, turning into a flophouse and, later, an art studio and classroom. Ninety years before the building became an adult, urban leather-fetish guesthouse, it served as a male-only boardinghouse for North Side factory workers.
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All five rooms connect to the kitchen and breakfast room, where guests can meet and greet over continental breakfast and freshly baked muffins, Syrjanen’s specialty.
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The Sports Room will also eventually sport a sling, one that’s held up by baseball bats, while the Bunk Room happily lodges three (wink, wink). While the Leather Room’s moniker speaks for itself (a king-sized bed with a leather bedspread, along with a chain-link sling), the seemingly innocuous Dreams Room, a nod to Kugelman’s days working as a manager for Disney, will one day get its own sling outfitted with Mickey ears. To that end, each guest room boasts a theme: Leather, Rubber, Sports, Dreams and Bunk. Occupying two second-floor apartments above Jackhammer and Mephisto Leathers, the five-room bed and breakfast, according to its website, offers “gracious hospitality in an environment of amazing fun,” one where fantasies-for gay or straight guests-can be realized. Leather weekend in May but remains a work-in-progress, is the brainchild of Jackhammer owners Jim Keup, and his partner, Joe, and Mephisto Leathers’ Eric Kugelman and Michael Syrjanen (who co-own Mephisto with in-house tailor Paul C). Visitors can enjoy a sling in their room (thread count not applicable), a cocktail with a (literal) rear view in the Hole and a scrub down in the gang shower.Īshland Arms, which opened during International Mr.
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At Rogers Park’s recently opened Ashland Arms Guest House (6410 N Clark St, 31 $79–$249), amenities also abound. At the new Dana Hotel and Spa in downtown Chicago, guests can revel in luxury amenities like 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, a cocktail with a view at Vertigo Sky Lounge and Italian rain-shower fixtures.