Remembering Kegs in Evanston

Baxter Lomax

   Sometimes its easy for Northwestern students to forget they are on a college campus. Evanston has totally transformed themselves into another corporate city/suburb of Chicago and there are just not really any cool places for students to take out their rigorous academic stress and have a good brew. This is especially true when one considers the number of bar options students at DePaul have an opportunity every night in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. Evanston is the complete opposite with a few steak houses and boring mundane Irish gastro pubs in their ever increasing urban downtown. the only people who usually go to these places are usually on the other side of fifty years of age and north of the 40 inch waistline.

Evanston village officials have successfully turned this area into a dull student area much like Hyde Park and the surrounding areas of the University of Chicago.
   Kegs was a great student bar with great beer pong games and just a natural hangout you would expect to see in a town that is host to a large Big Ten student population. Kegs had trouble at times just like any other bar where the medium age is nineteen but city officials successfully exploited these rare disturbances and the owner of Kegs often had lawsuits battling to stay in business with this city. Now students will have to do beer pong in the unsafely  confines of house parties or frat houses. The college bar experience is a crucial student experience as places where memories are forged and perceptions of the institution we’re bound to are altered and questioned by a student body discussing current events on and off campus. The keg being forced to close its doors by a city overly concerned with corporate and developer interests was shameful.

 When people think of Evanston it is  Northwestern  University that pops into their head first and not Peats' Steak House. Kegs had to lose its business and  lose their liquor license to puritanical self-aggrandizing municipal governments who just want the students presence and money but want to dictate how they shall spend their money and time. Evanston sucks