Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Al Capone did not send Bugs Moran candy on Valentine's Day 1929. Instead, he sent hit-men to kill him. They missed Bugs, but massacred seven of his buddies.

It happened at the garage that used to stand at 2122 N Clark St. Bugs' guys arrived thinking they'd buy bootleg booze, but it was a set up. Capone's gang entered dressed as cops, lined the men up against a wall, and sprayed them with more than 100 bullets. Lucky for Bugs, he'd already left.

Developers tore down the garage in 1967. Before the wrecking ball swung, Canadian George Patey bought all the bricks. He displayed them in a nightclub and eventually sold a few as souvenirs. In December 08, after Patey's death, his family put the rest of the blocks for sale on eBay.

Today a fenced lawn and trees mark the massacre site, at which passing dogs bark and howl and strain their leashes in the opposite direction.

Al Capone and St-Pierre

In Chicago we have Capone sites such as the St Valentine's Day Massacre lot and Holy Name Cathedral. But I ran into more Capone recently while working on the island of St-Pierre.

St-Pierre floats 15 miles from eastern Canada, near the province of Newfoundland (which I cover for Lonely Planet's Canada book). The fog-mantled little land mass is a territory of France, complete with berets, baguettes and Bordeaux. Back in the day it was forsaken and lawless.

Enter Capone. When Prohibition dried out the U.S.'s kegs in the 1920s, he set up shop in St-Pierre. He transformed the sleepy fishing harbor into a booming port that hauled in 300,000 cases of alcohol each month. Bottles were removed from their crates, placed in smaller carrying sacks and taken secretly to the U.S. coast by rum runners. Cutty Sark whiskey crates piled so high on St-Pierre's docks that locals started using the wood to build houses. Some homes are still around - as is the bootlegging supposedly.

So they may be toasting Capone on St-Pierre today, as Jan. 17 is his birthday. In Chicago, groupies typically mark the day at Capone's gravesite at Mt Carmel Cemetery in suburban Hillside, leaving offerings of whiskey or a Cuban cigar.

Holy Smoke

Holy Name Cathedral - the seat of Chicago's Catholic Church - has had an unholy time of it. The Great Fire torched it in 1871. Parishioners rebuilt it a few years later.

In the gangster age, a flower shop used to stand by the church. One day in 1924, the nice man who managed it was gunned down while trimming chrysanthemums for funeral wreaths. Turns out he was Dion O’Banion, a bootlegger who crossed Al Capone. Hymie Weiss took over the biz, but his flower arrangements fared no better. Capone's gang killed him two years later.

Powerful archbishops preached from the pulpit in the decades that followed. When they died, the church hung their red hats from the ceiling forevermore - except when the ceiling let loose a 10-pound piece of decorative wood that smashed 70 feet to the floor in 2008. This prompted a costly structural rehab. A few months after the church completed the job, Holy Name caught fire again. The blazed happened today, Feb. 4.