Recently I was on the “606” Trail and visited one of my favorite spots in Chicago – “Margie’s Candies“. Margie’s makes incredible ice cream sundaes that must be seen to be believed – and they come with an actual silver pitcher of hot fudge that you can pour on the ice cream yourself. Usually I would start with a photo of the restaurant but I wanted to make sure that the “money shot” is above the fold.
Margie’s Candies is at Western and Armitage avenues. The neighborhood has gone through immense changes over the years but that restaurant has not changed one iota. Every time I have ever been there it is busy and in the summer there usually is a line out the door for people buying ice cream “to go”.
The menu is completely old school and they have a vast array of sundaes of various sizes. The sundaes all come in cool sea shell dishes that you can share with long spoons.
They have very old jukeboxes from the ’70s at every table which don’t work but it is cool to scroll through the old songs. There is a lot of Beatles memorabilia because they stopped here after their concert at Comiskey Park in the 1960s. The capital budget for improvements at this restaurant must be zero; I was there a decade ago and nothing has changed and it was old back then. The place must be seen to be believed.
If you want to visit the 606 Trail get off at Western avenue and go north a couple blocks and Margie’s is well worth a stop even if you have to wait. You can jump on the Blue Line and head back into the loop or even onto O’Hare if you are heading out of town.
Cross posted at LITGM
Sigh. Reminds me of a little ice cream parlor in Pasadena – across Colorado from Vroman’s Books. It was called Wil Wrights, and the hot fudge sundaes were along the same lines — real home-made vanilla with little teeny specs of vanilla bean seed in it, real whipped cream, toasted whole Spanish almonds, and a maraschino cherry (with a stem and a seed in it!) and a little silver pitcher of hot fudge sauce to pour over. Mom used to take us in, after a visit to Vroman’s.
It’s gone now, of course. Last time I went looking for it, the shopfront had become a frozen yoghurt place – talk about desecration of a shrine.
Funny this came up. My 80 year old mom and I recently had dinner. We talked about ice cream sodas. We used to walk up to a nearby shopping center on Saturday mornings where she’d get her hair done in a bouffant at a small beauty parlor. This would’ve been about 1967 or so. Afterwards, we’d walk to the Read’s drug store and get club sandwiches and ice cream sodas at the lunch counter / ice cream fountain. The booths had the little juke-box music players where you could listen to a song for 5 cents.
[My mother’s first job was working at a soda fountain inside Doc’s Pharmacy in west Baltimore when she was a teenager in the early fifties. That was when Baltimore was still a working class industrial city, with steel mills and shipyards and department stores and working class neighborhoods. In those days you could go anywhere anytime and be safe. Half the police force still walked a beat or patrolled on horseback. And people didn’t put up with a lot of nonsense.]
The words ‘ice cream soda’ always evokes childhood Saturdays for me, going places with my beautiful and full of life young mother. Odd to see her eighty.
When I was in high school, we went to an ice cream shop at 79th and Stony Island across from the Avalon theater. They had a sundae that took at least two people to eat.
Now, it would be worth your life to get out of the car at that spot. The old Avalon theater is a Muslim temple.
Here is an old photo of that theater in its prime.
More photos of it.
And more
Too bad.
You should have included a trigger warning for lactose.
Is Lockhart’s Castle still around? I was in Chicago when I was 12 — 1971 — with my father and my uncle and two slightly younger cousins.
They had something called (IIRC) “Lockhart’s Mountain”, which was basically a mixing bowl filled with 23 scoops of different kinds of ice cream.
My father and uncle said they’d buy it for us, if we promised to eat the whole thing.
We did manage to polish it off, though how much of that was thanks to “assistance” from my father and uncle I cannot say… but we did our share of damage in reducing that mountain to a hole in the bowl…
I’ve still got a menu from the place somewhere in old keepsakes. I remember the place as a fairly large diner of the 50s/60s sort, lots of linoleum and stuff.
If you were in Oakland CA you went here:
http://www.fentonscreamery.com/
Their ice cream was a treat, though I was not a big fan of their sandwiches. The line almost always was out the door and across the front of the store.
Good memories, though with sadness at those no longer with us.
Or if you were on the other side of the Bay, it was the Palo Alto Creamery with its not to be missed Bubbly Burger. Great memories which I will not repeat for the sake of my children.
I think the reference to ‘Lockhart’s Castle’ should be for Lockwood Castle at 5400 W. Devon in Chicago and to its Giant Killer sundae. Sadly it is now a Starbucks
I know it well. A classic.
Lockwood Castle was before my time, but I am familiar with the neighborhood. It’s about a mile away from another Chicago institution, Superdawg.
Pat “The Great Santini” Conroy once once wrote about it. It’s an apt description of Chicagoans, talking to each other in food metaphors.