Just after the Great Fire incinerated most of Chicago in 1871, a local engineer named James McCole built a two-story, balloon-frame wooden structure with a detached garage at the southwest corner of Huron and Orleans.  A few months later, the city council passed an ordinance prohibiting the construction of wooden buildings in the downtown district, making McCole's structure one of the few remaining wooden structures built prior to the "new" law.  In 1921, a man named Vito Giacomo opened a restaurant on the first floor, replacing a grocery store that operated there for the preceding 49 years.  The restaurant, known as "The Green Door," snuck through the Prohibition era as a speakeasy (which apparently explains its name).  The building tilts slightly toward the north because it began to settle into the Earth in the early 1900's.

Harry Caray was a frequent visitor, and one of his Budweiser commercials was even filmed here.  The tavern, which has changed very little through the years, is peppered with such "bric-a-brac" as antique signs, posters, photographs, and other nostalgia.  What's more, the soap box car hanging from the ceiling was once used in a race in which Illinois native and former United States President Ronald Reagan once participated.