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“It was quite a fun club,” remembers DJ Danny Goss. After a couple of name and location changes (Carol’s Pub and Carol’s in Exile), Carol established this members-only club at 1355 North Wells Street and ran it until passing away in September 1979. Carol (Richard Farnham), was a grocer who first opened a gay bar called Coming Out Pub in 1972. In October 1978, Mother Carol took over the Den One space in Old Town where famous house DJ Ron Hardy first spun.
The beloved club was torn down to make way for a parking lot in 1982. “Who else could put a thousand miles of mylar ribbon down the outside of a building and cover a corner with glitter – right across the street from a police station?” quipped impressionist Allan Lozito of Dugan, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune. The club’s sixth anniversary featured nine mirror balls and four mortar guns shooting foam stars. As Danny Goss, DiVito’s alternate for many years, recalls, “Lou was the first DJ I ever heard mix on beat and in perfect pitch.” DiVito became Chicago radio’s first “hot mixer” in 1979, recording mixes for WDAI from his DJ booth.Įach year the club’s interior was refreshed in preparation for an anniversary bash. Billboard named DiVito “best regional dee-jay” in 19. An interior decorator, DiVito assisted in designing the club’s layout and sound and light systems. Lou DiVito became the Bistro’s main DJ in 1974. Dugan alluded to the club’s restrictive door policy in a 1974 Chicago Tribune article, explaining, “We’re primarily gay, and we don’t want straights filling the place up so our regular clientele can’t get in.” On some nights, the line of people waiting to get in stretched an entire block, just north of the iconic corn-cob shaped towers of Marina City. Go-go dancers, including a drag queen known as the Bearded Lady, often performed above the large dancefloor, which was surrounded by three bars and decorated by a pair of bright neon lips. Eddie Dugan opened The Bistro, Chicago’s first big, influential disco, in May of 1973, at what had been an old French restaurant.