![]() ![]() The Lexington hosted a variety of guests before its 1980 demise. ‘It was Capone’s hotel, although he didn’t own it’ The proprietor of Weird Harold’s, an adult bookstore, massage parlor and nude modeling studio in the South Loop in the 1970s, Rubin was known as the “king of Chicago pornography.” He scavenged marble from the Lexington after the residential hotel’s final 150 tenants - many on public assistance - were ordered to move out in October 1980. Harold Rubin - the “founder” of the concrete wall “under the hotel’s vaulted Michigan Avenue sidewalk” - had a more colorful reputation. Each was recalled as competent, self-effacing and honest by friends and colleagues after their deaths - O’Brien in 2003 and Baumann in 2012. ![]() Baumann was a three-time Pulitzer finalist. O’Brien was part of a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for an exposé on vote fraud. Memento hunters - many searching for relics connected to the building’s mobster past - discovered the odd structure.īoth Baumann and O’Brien were respected, decorated, longtime reporters for the Chicago Tribune who also authored a bookcase worth of true crime titles. (Chicago Tribune archive)Īlmost five years before Rivera fired a machine gun on live TV, Edward Baumann and John O’Brien informed readers of the Chicago Tribune that a huge concrete slab under the Lexington Hotel “may be the tomb of some of Capone’s enemies.” A story that published in the Jedition of the Chicago Tribune suggested the bodies of Al Capone's enemies may be buried in a "tomb" beneath the Lexington Hotel, the gangster's one-time headquarters, at Michigan Avenue and Cermak Road. ![]()
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