Description - Exterior

A squat two-story red-brick shell on the border of Bridgeport and the Yards, wedged between an old funeral parlor and a boarded-up tailor’s. The new sign—The Blue Spats—is too clean, too bright, and too crooked. Work crews come and go at all hours. The sidewalk is littered with cigarette butts, paint rags, and swatches of velvet Frankie didn’t like. Upstairs windows are cracked open with fans buzzing, trying to keep the smell of varnish and ambition from choking the workers.
 

Description - Interior

Ground Floor: The Club Currently a maze of scaffolding, paint buckets, and shouted arguments. Frankie’s vision is high-class: stage front and center, long mahogany bar stretching along one wall, soft velvet booths, marble dance floor. What he has is stripped floors, exposed beams, and a stage built three inches too short. The lights don’t match, the liquor isn’t stocked, and the sound system was “borrowed” from a busted movie house. A jazz band played once during a walk-through—three of the ceiling tiles fell on the drummer.
  Second Floor: South Side Realism The upstairs is classic South Side mixed-use—converted apartments and offices. Frankie kept it that way. There’s a one-bedroom apartment for the club manager (rent free), a cramped back office with a desk that came with the building, a windowless room full of liquor cases no one's inventoried, and two rooms still occupied by squatters Frankie hasn’t noticed yet. One was a Veil practitioner. The other might still be.
 

History

Used to be The Mercury Room, a bingo hall and backroom casino that got raided in ‘48. Sat empty for years, full of rats, rot, and memories nobody missed—until Frankie Spats decided he needed a “respectable” club to show off his class and funnel his heroin profits. He bought it in cash and started spending like Sinatra was on the way. Now it’s stuck somewhere between flop house and fever dream.
 

Owned By

Frankie Spats, South Side heroin kingpin with a taste for spectacle and zero sense of design. He calls the shots, funds the project, and mostly gets in the way.
 

Run By

Alphonse “Al” Mooney, former hotel manager turned club fixer. Knows lighting, liquor, and how to keep Frankie from bankrupting the project in a week.
 

Employees

• Al Mooney – Manager. Chain-smokes, budgets like a bastard, and loathes modern jazz.
• Marla Rose – Booker with connections at every lounge and burlesque joint in Chicago.
• Santo – Electrician. Possibly a Veil user. Definitely on parole.
• Chucky Diamond – Frankie’s “floor man.” Wears a tux every day. Does nothing useful.
• Reese – Bartender-in-training. Was hired for his looks. Still learning gin from vodka.
• Lorraine – Elderly coat-check lady. Hasn't been paid yet. Won’t leave.

 

Regulars

• Frankie himself, pacing around with swatches and blueprints like a mobbed-up Gatsby.
• Yap and Wick
• Musicians looking for a steady gig—some of them desperate enough to deal with Frankie.
• City inspectors with “concerns.” Some real, some looking for their envelope.
• A woman in a red dress seen only in the upstairs window after dark. No one claims to live there.

 

Notes

• The Veil lingers from its Mercury Room days—some backroom games weren’t just poker.
• The club’s future is wide open: high-class speakeasy, Veil hotspot, trap-fueled moneymaker, or cursed disaster.
• A shipment of antique chandeliers from New Orleans just arrived. One screams faintly at night.
• Frankie has no taste in music. He once tried to book a ventriloquist as a headliner.
• If the crew wants in—on security, supply, or staging—Frankie’s listening. For now.
• One of the old upstairs squatters drew protective Veil runes behind the wall paneling. Frankie had it painted over. It didn't take.