Waiting for Chicago to Ban Smoking...

This week I took out a friend of mine who is new in town to a bit of a pub crawl in Bucktown / Wicker Park, a neighborhood where I used to live. We started at Northside, a cool bar with an atrium that opens in the summer (the food there is decent, too), then headed across the street to Cans to shoot some pool (where the food is also surprisingly good), then up to Lemmings, and finally over to Lotties. All of these bars with the exception of Lotties are on Damen avenue starting at North avenue and heading north (the direction), you will hit Northside, then Cans, then Lemmings, and then you cut over East a block south of Armitage and you can see Lotties.

This neighborhood is popular with twenty-somethings (Generation "Y"?), and one thing that they LOOOOOVVVEEE to do is smoke. You can't believe how much they smoke. As soon as they come into the bar they light up instantly, pretty much all of them. It doesn't help that even people who don't smoke that often tend to light up when they've had a few drinks, and most of the people at Lotties have had a lot more than a few drinks.

I got home just reeking of smoke. I might as well have lit up a few myself. Not only that, but I put my jacket in the closet, and the next day the whole closet stunk, too.

Here is a link to an article about banning smoking in public places in Chicago. You'd figure that it can't be that difficult, since they did it in New York City (where they have even more young hipsters so it must have been even more painful) and in Ireland, of all places. But here in Chicago it takes a long time for even obvious ideas to take hold. Better get back to debating Fois Gras...