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Red Lion Pub

CHICAGO

JOHN CORDWELL WAS A MAN’S MAN IN SO MANY ways. As a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II, he was shot down, captured by the Germans, and became one of the forgers involved in the failed escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III, located near Sagan, Poland; the heroic effort was later immortalized in the 1963 Steve McQueen movie, The Great Escape. After the war, Cordwell moved to Chicago, where he became a renowned architect and city planner. Chicago’s popular rapid-transit system probably never would have been built without his guidance and direction. Even while accomplishing all these great things, Cordwell longed for one simple pleasure, to hoist a pint of stout in his own pub, just like the pubs he used to frequent in his native England.

John Cordwell realized his dream in 1984 when he and his son Colin bought a bar at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue on Chicago’s North Side, across the street from the infamous Biograph Theater where John Dillinger met his fate, and renamed it the Red Lion Pub. Until his death in 1999, the Red Lion was something of a home away from home for the senior Cordwell.

“But I know my father is still here,” said Colin Cordwell, as I sat at the bar with him and his brother-in-law, Nick Rice.

Nick had longish white hair and a receding hairline. He wore a T-shirt that read, A dog is the only relative you get to choose. “We feel him all the time,” Nick said.

It was mid-afternoon on a weekday and the pub was not crowded. As I sat at the long bar with the two men, my wife, Mary, sat at a booth by the large window overlooking the street. The sunlight came in through the window, but farther back at the bar, the pub was not as well lit.

“I’ve got a photo that was recently taken by one of our customers that I’m sure shows my father,” Colin said. The photo depicted some people at the bar and a misty figure with a face that Colin recognized as that of his father. “I knew it was my father,” Colin said, “because he had his hand on the girl’s breast.”