Name: Nick's Beer Garden
Address: 1516 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL, 60622
Price range: $

Nick's Beer Garden

Wicker Park · Bar Community-sourced, unverified

📍 1516 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622

Nick's Beer Garden has been a Chicago late-night institution since 1977, when it opened at Halsted and Armitage on the site of a former bar so rough it had doubled as a heroin shooting gallery.

A 4am liquor license and 'Peaches,' a nude painting that survived being shot four times in 1978

Against the odds, it became one of the city's first neighborhood taverns to draw a genuinely famous crowd — Caroline Kennedy, basketball Hall of Famer Artis Gilmore, and Cubs shortstop Ivan DeJesus all passed through its doors in the early years. The bar's signature piece of decor, a large nude painting nicknamed 'Peaches' or 'Our Lady of Halsted St.,' survived a 1978 shooting — a patron put four rounds from a .45 into the painting and its frame — and still hangs today as a genuine piece of only-in-Chicago bar lore.

The bar moved to its current Wicker Park home in 1994, taking over a space that had previously housed the Artful Dodger and Club Dreamerz, and added a proper outdoor patio and beer garden that now sits beneath the rumble of the Blue Line L. Quasi-tropical touches — plastic pineapples, a stuffed sailfish, a vintage surfboard — give the room a loose, anything-goes energy that matches its 4am liquor license, among the rarest and latest in the city. R&B bands play live Friday and Saturday nights, and the crowd genuinely thickens after midnight, when Nick's becomes one of the last real options standing on Milwaukee Avenue.

Hours

Sun-Fri4pm-4am

Sat4pm-5am

🥡 Takeout unconfirmed

Amenities & accessibility

❔Takeout: unverified

❔Wheelchair access: unverified

☀️Outdoor seating available

Location

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Nick's Beer Garden

Nick's Beer Garden has been a Chicago late-night institution since 1977, when it opened at Halsted and Armitage on the site of a former bar so rough it had doubled as a heroin shooting gallery.

Specials at Nick's Beer Garden