The Hard Rock Cafe will close its River North location March 29 after nearly four decades in business, the company confirmed.
“Hard Rock has enjoyed serving the Windy City community for nearly 40 years and playing a role in the city’s celebrated dining culture,” the cafe’s parent company, Hard Rock International, said in a statement. “We are so grateful to our incredible team members, community partners and fans for their support and memories all this time.”
The restaurant, at 63 W. Ontario St., opened in 1986 and is marked by a giant neon guitar sign and features rock memorabilia on its walls. In a review at the time, a Tribune writer described the cafe as “a family restaurant” serving up “good, honest, filling American fair,” including burgers and barbecued ribs.
“Definitely not a pick-up joint, this restaurant has a safe feeling that makes it comfortable for unescorted single women,” the Tribune reviewer wrote.
The closing of the restaurant that was once a popular tourist destination was first reported by Axios.
In a notification to the state as required by Illinois law, Hard Rock International reported 55 planned layoffs to begin at the end of March.
The company said Chicago employees who were laid off can apply to other positions with the company and that it would provide employees with “outplacement support and resources.”
Hard Rock said it has a total of 319 locations in more than 70 countries. Rockford and northern Indiana are among those locations.
In the letter former President Biden wrote to President Trump, he wished him well during his second term and said, “may God bless you.”
“As I take leave of his sacred office I wish you and your family all the best in the next four years,” Biden wrote. “The American people – and people around the world – look to this house for steadiness in the inevitable storms of history, and my prayer is that in the coming years will be a time of prosperity, peace, and grace for our nation.”
“May God bless you and guide you as He has blessed and guided our beloved country since our founding,” the letter concluded.
Biden departed office after his first and only term on Monday. Trump was sworn in for the second time and returned to the White House.
In the Resolute Desk upon his arrival was the letter, signed by Biden and dated Monday.
Trump said it was a “very nice letter”
and “a little bit of an inspirational type of letter.”
The president discovered the letter when taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Monday evening. He held up the envelope with a “47” on it to mark Trump’s second term.
The two presidents appeared to have a friendly conversation and relationship amid the transition of power, despite the name-calling and tumultuous history between them.
Trump took a few shots at Biden in his inaugural address but largely remained respectful of the outgoing president.
The letter was obtained by NewsNation
, which like The Hill is owned by Nexstar.
The town of Munster was incorporated as a community in 1907.
But the history of the landscape and earlier settlers dates back even further.
It started with a small inn and tavern at the corner of Ridge Road and Colombia Avenue around 1845, operated by Allan and Julia Watkins Brass. The couple knew weary travelers made their way to Chicago along Ridge Road and needed a resting place and hot meal as a welcome respite from their journey.
It was first a simple structure originally operated as a small one-room tavern, built around 1837 by David Gibson. In 1845, the Brasses moved from New York and purchased the property to build the new, larger two-story inn on the south side of Ridge Road, branding the existing gathering area already popular with customers as “The Brass Tavern.” The couple credited their brisk business and the frequency of traffic on Ridge Road to the neighboring Dutch farmers who attracted truck drivers delivering produce, especially onions and seed onions, plucked from the fields and farms across the Illinois state line and “taken to the city.”
Today, the pub and bar area located off the lobby of The Center for Visual and Performing Arts, 1040 Ridge Road in Munster across Columbia Avenue and Kaske Homestead, is named The Brass Tavern in honor of the early roots in sipping success.
A robust business is the planted seed of future success for any new community. In 1925, the Munster Chamber of Commerce was born as a way to unite and support both existing businesses and new establishments.
This weekend, the Munster Chamber of Commerce is celebrating its 100th anniversary at the organization’s annual dinner and dance gala held in the main ballroom of The Center for Visual and Performing Arts. As a longtime journalist, I’ve written about Munster since my college days at Valparaiso University, including when I wrote about the opening of “the new Center for Visual and Performing Arts” ready to be unveiled in 1989.
My faith and ongoing interest in community history and preservation tied to my journalism credit are among the reasons I’m pleased and honored to be recognized as the 2025 “Citizen of the Year” by the Town of Munster and the Munster Chamber of Commerce.
Whether it’s my writing features, columns and stories to educate, inform or just inspire recollections and nostalgia, or it’s my marketing director duties at The Center for Visual and Performing Arts when welcoming dining and theater guests to escape to our beautiful world of art, music, fine dining and entertainment, I’m grateful for a role that encourages smiles and fond memories.
Each year, the Munster Chamber of Commerce dreams up a clever theme and imaginative décor idea for the annual gala. In the past, themes have included the 1920s era of “The Great Gatsby,” “City of Lights” Paris, and New York’s disco destinations of the 1970s Studio 54.
Once before, in January 2017, I found myself accepting an award at this same gala event. It was the annual community “beautification” award plaque and it was presented to The Center for Visual and Performing Arts for the recent addition of the new Woodside Terrace outside patio adjacent to the ballroom. My supervisor, the late Mylinda Cane, asked me to attend and accept the award.
In 1989, philanthropist and real estate visionary Don Powers was named “Citizen of the Year,” and one of my arts advocate mentors and predecessors at the CVPA, John Mybeck, was bestowed that same honor in 2006, and couple Cal and Cathy Bellamy received the honor in 2003.
In recent years, Pat Popa (2020), Wendy Mis (2021), Damian Rico (2022) and Brad Hemingway (2023) have accepted the same distinction.
For 2025 recognition, Sherry Sink of Superior Air-Ground Ambulance Service has been named “volunteer of the year.”
Gourmet Goddess entrepreneur Katie Sannito is the current president of the Munster Chamber of Commerce. For more information about Saturday’s event or the Munster Chamber of Commerce, call 219-836-5549 or visit www.munsterchamber.org.
Philip Potempa is a journalist, published author and the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@powershealth.org.
The commercial imperatives of Broadway can be really healthy for naturally academic playwrights like James Ijames, one of contemporary American theater’s fiercest intellectuals and most committed deconstructionists. You can get away with whip-smart progressive radicalism in academic and regional theaters but, before someone produces your show on Broadway, they typically need to be convinced of two things: first, that ordinary people actually will show up and, second, they will be highly entertained if they do.
I think that’s a big part of why “Fat Ham,” a Broadway play now getting its first Chicago-based production at the Goodman Theatre, is such a successful endeavor.
On the one hand, Ijames gets to riff on “Hamlet.” That’s a sufficiently familiar title to keep audiences clued-in to the show’s trajectory and help Ijames make the argument that tragic heroes with gravitas should not be restricted to noir-clad, moody Danes, all privileged angst down to their overly articulate bones. Rather, he is saying, the list should be broad enough to include introverted, alienated malcontents in North Carolina, struggling with their online community college courses and trying to make sense of their dysfunctional family, wherein the funeral barbecue meats of one daddy hath furnished forth the backyard party celebrating another.
“Fat Ham” replaces Hamlet with Juicy (Trumane Alston), a Black, gay, self-aware young man struggling with body image, personal confidence and the oppressive expectations of others, especially his father, as much as any broader existential angst. The outlines of the source play are there in translation and characters based on Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes and Horatio all show up in Juicy’s folks’ backyard, as does the ghost that kicks everything off.
“Fat Ham” is asking, for whom now is the traditional tragedy? And, as Arthur Miller did years before in “Death of a Salesman,” Ijames is making a case for representative magnitude, or a more democratic take on what personal situations deserve our focus. There are many Juicys out there, “Fat Ham” argues, and Hamlet, for all his fame, was just a prince with privilege. And mental health struggles should not be reduced to a mere theatrical plot point. In this play, Juicy is not on some grand quest as much as he’s trying to figure out what it means to avenge a father you never much liked in the first place.
So if you’re interested in all of that stuff, a blend of academic ideas, moral points of view and the-personal-is-political arguments, “Fat Ham” (which is quite similar in point of view to the musical “A Strange Loop”) offers much on which you can chew. People already are writing academic papers on this play. But for many people at the Goodman’s opening night, all of that was flowing very much in the context of a domestic comedy, an exaggerated, sit-com style treatment of wild and crazy people that some of us know all too well.
Trumane Alston and Sheldon D. Brown in “Fat Ham” at the Goodman Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
Trumane Alston and Anji White in “Fat Ham” at the Goodman Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
Sheldon D. Brown, Ronald L. Conner, Trumane Alston, E. Faye Butler, Ireon Roach and Anji White in “Fat Ham” at the Goodman Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
Anji White and Ronald L. Conner in “Fat Ham” at the Goodman Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
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Trumane Alston and Sheldon D. Brown in “Fat Ham” at the Goodman Theatre. (Liz Lauren)
The Goodman’s director, Tyrone Phillips, doesn’t ascend the heights of the original Broadway production, which was edgier, more visually interesting and in some ways actually more personal, even though it was staged in a larger theater. I liked the central Goodman performance from Alston quite a lot but he needs to take more definitive command of the storytelling, acting as our entree into this story. Phillips sometimes lets Juicy get lost in all of the other action when he needs to take the audience by the hand.
That’s partly because of the ensemble-based life Phillips injects into the show and the comedic strength of the character work (from the likes of Ronald L. Conner, Ireon Roach, Victor Musoni, Anji White and E. Faye Butler), and the foregrounding of physical comedy at the expense of the characters’ collective vulnerability and the play’s baked-in cynicism. That said, Sheldon D. Brown, who plays perhaps the most difficult role of Larry — Juicy’s doppelganger in some ways and his militaristic, disciplined opposite in others — is exceptionally rich. Those scenes are the best.
All that said, “Fat Ham” is this writer’s best work to date and, to my mind, an important American play that will last the test of time. This production also is a great deal of fun.
Sign up for the Theater Loop newsletter: Our weekly newsletter has the latest news and reviews from America’s hottest theater city. Theater critic Chris Jones
will share a behind-the-curtain look at what you need to know.
Ask most people today what “Loper Bright” is, and you will likely get some funny answers. Yet, this seemingly obscure term refers to a major U.S. Supreme Court case decided just six months ago.
Lincoln-Way West’s Brandon Bavirsha
has grown accustomed to being underestimated.
As a senior with limited varsity experience before this season, Bavirsha has certainly been flying under the radar.
The fact that he’s not even 220 pounds and is competing at heavyweight against some guys nearly 70 pounds bigger than him? Well, that just fits in perfectly with his long-shot story.
“I love being the underdog,” Bavirsha said. “Some of my best matches this year were taking the No. 2-ranked guy to overtime and losing by one point to the No. 5 guy.
“Me getting no recognition is OK. I like that they don’t know what they’re about to face.”
Bavirsha isn’t as much of an unknown anymore after he won the heavyweight title Saturday in the 24-team Illini Classic at Lincoln-Way Central.
Bavirsha (27-8) fought his way through four tight matches and won three of them in overtime, including a 2-1 victory in the finals over Jackson Reilly
from Clovis North from California.
This time, Bavirsha was actually in a position he’s unaccustomed to — being the favorite. He earned the top seed for the tournament.
“I knew I was given an amazing chance with the one seed,” he said. “That’s one of the first times I’ve had that where usually I’m having to come out and face the best kid in the bracket in the first round.
“I had that earlier in the year where I had to face (third-ranked Mateusz Nycz
) from Marmion in the first round and I got pinned in the first round. But now, I just fight no matter what and I’ve gotten myself in a position to get a good seed at a tournament like this.”
Lincoln-Way West’s Brandon Bavirsha, right, and Clovis North’s Jackson Reilly wrestle in the heavyweight championship bout of the Illini Classic at Lincoln-Way Central in New Lenox on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025. (Sean King / Daily Southtown)
Early last winter, Bavirsha won a challenge match at practice to take the 215-pound spot on varsity but he was in and out of the lineup until he suffered a back injury in the middle of the season. When he returned, he spent the rest of the time on the junior varsity team.
“There was a lot of hunger coming into this year,” he said. “I worked on getting bigger and stronger. I’m still not much bigger. I weighed in at 215 (Saturday), but I’ve learned how to wrestle these heavier guys.”
Lincoln-Way West coach Brian Glynn
said Bavirsha’s intelligence on the mat allows him to craft a winning strategy.
“He’s a smart wrestler and a hard worker, but the season he’s had has gone way past the anticipation of how good I thought he’d be,” Glynn said. “And he’s still getting better.
“He could be on the podium (at state), there’s no doubt.”
Senior 215-pounder Nate Elstner,
who’s ranked No. 10 in Class 3A by Illinois Matmen, finished second Saturday. He’s had an up-close view of improvements made by Bavirsha, his practice partner.
“It’s awesome to see,” Elstner said. “It’s always good to see those types of guys who have been working hard in the room for three years and who might not have been seeing the lights a lot now get their shot.
“He works out with me every morning before school. It’s really starting to pay off for him, and I’m proud of him for that.”
Lincoln-Way West’s Nate Elstner walks off the mat after defeating Oswego’s Christian Paige during a match in the Lincoln-Way West Mega Duals in New Lenox on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025. (Troy Stolt / Daily Southtown)
Bavirsha, who also was a tight end and fullback for the Warriors in football, did not wrestle growing up and planned to play basketball in high school.
He did not make the freshman basketball team, which has worked out for him in the long run.
“After I tried out for basketball and failed, coach Glynn begged me to death to wrestle,” Bavirsha said. “I had tried it in fifth grade and it didn’t last long. I thought, ‘This sucks. I don’t ever want to do this in my life.’ But coach Glynn convinced me.”
And now, Bavirsha is an Illini Classic champion.
“Not a single person believed in me from the start of the season until now,” he said. “It feels absolutely amazing to prove everyone wrong.”
A major storm spread heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain across the southern United States on Wednesday, breaking snow records and treating the region to unaccustomed perils and wintertime joy.
From Texas through the Deep South, down into Florida and to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, snow and sleet made for accumulating ice in New Orleans, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Florida and other major cities.
At least three deaths were attributed to the cold as dangerous below-freezing temperatures with even colder wind chills settled in. Arctic air also plunged much of the Midwest and the eastern U.S. into a deep freeze, grounding hundreds of flights. Government offices remained closed, as were classrooms for more than a million students more accustomed to hurricane dismissals than snow days.
New Englanders know what to do in weather like this: Terry Fraser of Cape Cod, Massachusetts didn’t have her trusty windshield scraper while visiting her new granddaughter in Brunswick, Georgia, so she used a plastic store discount card to remove the snow and ice from her rental SUV in a frozen hotel parking lot.
“This is what we do up north when you don’t have a scraper,” Fraser said. “Hey, it works.”
Frasier had one additional bit of advice: “Don’t use your credit card, because then you can’t go shopping.”
In Tallahassee, Florida, the Holmes family set their alarms early on Wednesday and found a snow-covered slope before it melted away. Nine-year-old Layla and 12-year-old Rawley used what they had: a boogie board and a skimboard.
“Gotta get creative in Florida!” mom Alicia Holmes said.
Anchorage wants its snow back
The record 10-inch snowfall in New Orleans was more than double what Anchorage, Alaska, has received since the beginning of December, the National Weather Service said.
“We’d like our snow back,” the weather service office in Anchorage joked in a post on X on Wednesday. “Or at least some King Cake in return.”
It also was warmer Wednesday morning in Anchorage than in New Orleans, Atlanta, Jacksonville or Charlotte, North Carolina, according to the weather service.
Even the interstate closes
The snow and ice also closed highways — including many miles of the nation’s southernmost interstate, I-10, as it stretches from Florida to Texas. Especially prone to freezing were the elevated roads and bridges that run over Louisiana’s bayous.
“Louisiana, if you can, just hang in there,” Gov. Jeff Landry said, warning that Tuesday’s “magical” snow day would turn dangerous Wednesday as conditions worsened.
Highways were deserted along long stretches in Louisiana and Georgia, where a jackknifed truck closed part of the snowy interchange between Interstate 16 and Interstate 95.
In Charleston, South Carolina, it took crews nearly 16 hours to reopen travel in one direction along the massive 2 1/2 mile Ravenel Bridge that carries about 100,000 vehicles a day.
The icy conditions plagued motorists in Georgia, where troopers responded to more than 1,000 calls for help. Hundreds of trucks backed up near a crash on Interstate 75 between Macon and Atlanta. Some motorists slept in their vehicles overnight as even a fire truck got stuck on the ice, DeKalb County authorities said. And police appealed to the owners of dozens of cars abandoned at the bottom of a glazed-over hill in Snellville to retrieve their vehicles as soon as it’s safe.
Who needs a beach when there’s snow
Some people took advantage of the Ravenel bridge’s steep overpasses, turning them into impromptu sled runs. On the Outer Banks, children sledded down snow-covered sand dunes near where the Wright Brothers first took flight, while adults tried to navigate waist-high snow drifts that had piled up on the Kitty Hawk Pier. A ferry system suspended service between the barrier islands.
“It’s maybe once every 10 years that we get a good one like this,” said Ryan Thibodeau, 38, co-owner of Carolina Designs Realty, a vacation rental company.
The storm that prompted the first ever blizzard warnings for some places along the Texas and Louisiana coast also covered the white-sand beaches of normally balmy Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Pensacola Beach, Florida. Snow covering South Carolina sand from Hilton Head Island to the giant Ferris wheel in Myrtle Beach created more opportunities to turn surf gear into sleds.
“It didn’t have the speed of a toboggan,” Alex Spiotta said as his family glided on a boogie board in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. “But in the South, you have to use what you have.”
Others went sledding in a laundry basket in Montgomery, Alabama, and pool-tubing down a Houston hill. A car pulled a skiier down a street in Pensacola, Florida. In Metairie, Louisiana, several nuns enjoyed throwing powdery snow at a priest. In New Orleans, a hockey player skated down Canal Street, while urban skiing was attempted along Bourbon Street and people went sledding down the snow-covered Mississippi River levees on kayaks, cardboard boxes and inflatable alligators.
Flight cancellations, fatalities and sports postponements
Nearly 2,000 U.S. flights were canceled and 2,300 more were delayed by midday Wednesday, according to online tracker FlightAware.com.
Record demands for electricity to stay warm were met by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides power to more than 10 million customers in seven states, and PJM Interconnection, which operates the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid. But more than 100,000 customers were without power across the region Wednesday morning, including about 46,000 in Georgia and 37,000 in Florida, according to the website PowerOutage.us.
Two people died in the cold in Austin, Texas, which said emergency crews responded to more than a dozen “cold exposure” calls. In Georgia, authorities said one person died from hypothermia.
The storm prompted several sports-related postponements Wednesday night, including the NBA game between the Milwaukee Bucks at the New Orleans Pelicans, and the women’s college basketball game between No. 5 LSU at No. 2 South Carolina.
And yet, the planet is getting warmer
In Southern California, where blazes have killed at least 28 people and burned thousands of homes, Santa Ana winds and dry conditions worsened by climate chaange remained a concern.
Even as the United States, which is about 2% of the Earth’s surface, shivers through abnormally cold temperatures, the world as a whole is breaking heat records. So far, 2025 has had the hottest first 20 days of a year on record,
according to Europe’s Copernicus climate service, breaking last year’s record, according to data going back to 1940.
So far this year, U.S. weather has set or tied 697 daily records
for coldest temperature, not much more than the 629 daily records reported so far this year for warmest temperatures for the date. In the past 365 days, U.S. weather stations have recorded five times as many heat records than cold, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Scientists say they seem to be seeing more frequent cold air outbreaks — but not cooler weather in general — and theorize that a warming Arctic is altering the jet stream and polar vortex to allow cold air to escape and plunge further south.
Payne reported from Tallahassee, Florida, and Bynum from Brunswick, Georgia. Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington, D.C., and AP writers Sarah Brumfield in Cockeysville, Maryland; Jack Brook in New Orleans; Sara Cline in Key Largo, Florida; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia; Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; Jeff Martin in Kennesaw, Georgia; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, contributed.
