There is no building to point at here. The Lexington Hotel came down in nineteen ninety-five, so if you're hunting for something grand, I'm sorry. You're standing in front of the memory of a headquarters.
Because for three years at the end of the twenties, this was the address in Chicago. Al Capone didn't rent a room at the Lexington. He took the building. He turned a ten-story hotel into a fortress — armed men posted on the floors, a private elevator, and a set of tunnels connecting to the buildings around it, so that if the day ever came, the most wanted man in America could disappear into the ground like a very well-dressed groundhog.
He ran everything from a suite up top. Beer, gambling, the rackets, a river of money nobody could quite count. And this is the part that surprises people — Capone was fastidious to the point of obsession. He bathed three times a day. He had his suits dry-cleaned after wearing them once. The staff, well out of his earshot, took to calling him Mister T
hree Baths. A man who had people killed for a living, quietly driving housekeeping up the wall.
He also understood public relations better than most people running for office. When the Depression hit and the breadlines grew, Capone opened a soup kitchen just off the Loop — a storefront with a sign reading Free Soup, Coffee and Doughnuts for the Unemployed. It served thousands of meals a day, no q
