Sam's hits the bricks

Sam's Wines & Spirits is having a sidewalk sale this weekend and it reminds me of the days when Sam's had a sidewalk sale every day.

Sam Rosen started his wine store in the late 1940s. I wasn't around then, but by the time I got to Chicago in the late 1980s, it was still in its original location, in that beautiful, old building at the corner of Halsted and North Avenue, which I guess is now considered Lincoln Park in the ever-expanding way of popular neighborhood designations. It's the building where the Jared's jewelry store is now.

The Rosens weren't the ones who restored the building. In fact, when it became feasible to restore it, they moved out, to the space where the Whole Foods House of Rodents is now, then a few years after that into the current location.

Back in those days, that neighborhood was nothing like it is now. It was just another run-down urban neighborhood known as Little Hell, because the natural gas companies had facilities there that sent pillars of flame into the sky all night. Then that was replaced by a different kind of hell, the Cabrini-Green housing project.

But Sam's was there for a reason. The idea was low overhead, high volume and low margins, which meant low prices. People in the know bought their wine at Sam's, just like men in the know bought their suits at Irv's. When I moved here, a friend who was a Chicago native brought me up to speed on all that stuff.

In those days, the building didn't have any windows. When the store opened each day, they pulled some of the merchandise through the windows onto the sidewalks. With no glass in the windows, they couldn't really lock it up, but a few well trained German shepherds kept the place from getting cleaned out. When the neighborhood started to revive and Sam's moved a few blocks west, they didn't change much. It was still a big, warehouse-like space, with product displayed in stacked, cut cases or on plain, steel shelves, and it usually was so jammed with merchandise that you could barely push a cart through the aisles.

The next generation of Rosens changed a lot of things and for better or worse, Sam's is a lot more "normal" today, but it still has good prices and great selection. Instead of one location, it now has four, along with a fully-functioning ecommerce web site. It's still true that if a beer, wine or distilled spirit product is available in the Chicago area, you probably can find it at Sam's. This weekend, you may even find it displayed on the sidewalk.