At the City Winery in Chicago, what’s behind the scenes is almost as exciting as what’s on stage. The West Loop building was once a nondescript cold storage facility for a food distributor at the edge of the famed meatpacking district. Now the 1920 warehouse has been transformed into a winery, restaurant, and above all, a hall for all styles of music, from rock ‘n’ roll to rockabilly. Between foot-stomping sets, take a few minutes to check out the furniture, fixtures, walls,

Downed too many St. George’s Green Chile Pepper vodkas at Obed and Isaac’s in Peoria, Illinois? No problem--you can pray for sobriety without leaving the premises, which started out as a Presbyterian church. The 1889 building, a city landmark that’s also on the National Register of Historic Places, was salvaged by the Conn’s Hospitality Group, a family business that specializes in renovating older buildings. The church, also known as the Cornerstone Building, reopened in 20

School’s been out for the summer, but now college students are descending on two historic buildings in Milwaukee’s old Pabst Brewery complex, abandoned in 1996 but slowly coming back to life. Like the Brewhouse Inn down the street ( see previous article ) and the Best Place banquet hall around the corner, the two buildings--a student residence known as Eleven25 and the Zilber School of Public Health -- are both classic examples of how to shed new light (literally) on a shutt

Cream City. Brew City. Beertown. Miltown. Call it by any name, but Milwaukee is outfitting its grand old buildings with a new set of clothes at a prodigious rate. Nowhere is this trend more evident than on the city’s west side, at the 20-acre site of the former Pabst Brewery that operated there for about 150 years. An empty ghost town after the last batch of beer was churned out in 1996, the brewery complex is now being resurrected. And in a sustainable way, with specific go