Faces Disco

940 N. Rush St.

Discotheque catering to, at its peak, 16,000 card-carrying members. Taken over in 1978 by Jewish Lithuanian immigrant Milton Shlaes (at the time 71 years old) and his brothers Ben and George, the venue was, according to longtime manager Jim Rittenberg, the midwest’s Studio 54 before Studio 54: “If they got a celebrity, it was in People magazine. If we got a celebrity, it was in Kup’s column [in the Chicago Sun-Times].” And celebrities were indeed known to canoodle at Faces: Mick Jagger, Sting, Sinatra, and more visited the club when they were in town. By the late 1980s, the pressures of higher rents in the Rush Street area forced the club to shut its doors.