Further advice for the raffish Chicago visitor, courtesy of Chicago Confidential:

On dating: “If you are really hard up, you can always join a church or the Y. Young female hayseeds off the farms usually head directly for such places in Chicago.”

On dates: “If she lives in a residential area, and you’re downtown, don’t offer to pick her up, as it may consume two hours of your time and a sawbuck of your currency. Even the flossiest are used to traveling by ‘El.’ She won’t be sore if you tell her to meet you.”

On downtown: “Anyway, Chicago is painfully short on local celebrities. . . . The glamor joints are thus forced to exist on the pickings from mobocracy and slobocracy. The Windy City, once a great night-life town, is now spurlos verschwindt after dark.”

On fine dining: “To the tourist mind this splendiferous retreat [the Pump Room] is a sort of combination Buckingham Palace and El Morocco. But the Easterner sees many of its patrons as corn-fed Main Street dandies playing at being big-town. The piece-de-resistance is a steak on a flaming sword, served by flunkies gotten up like Roxy ushers. In Gotham, flaming swords go with the $1.25 table d’hote in Rooshian tearooms heavy with atmosphere, Gypsy fortune-tellers, and hot tea in glasses.” 

On the law: “There is one instance on record where a policeman did step to the side and arrest a murderer: he had parked the corpse in front of a fire plug.”

On journalism: “A famous Chicago editor had a sign hung high over the city room which said: A DOG-FIGHT ON CLARK STREET IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN A WAR IN THE BALKANS.”

On culture: “Each and every component of Chicago’s polyglot and polychrome population strives to hold its own ways, but the Midwest gets them. They have swelled the population and some have risen to altitude and power as among the finest citizens, and the most deadly, but they cannot dent Chicago inwardly or outwardly. As groups they wield tremendous influence for good and evil. But they intermarry, or gradually learn American ways, take on the habits and the dress and coloration of the city and of the sections, and leave Chicago still a gigantic village, the heart of thousands of other inland villages, a huge provincial camp-meeting of Americans.”