Durty Nellie's Has Played Its Last Show in Palatine

The Smith Street pub and concert room closed Oct. 4 after 54 years, and the village has already approved a brewery for the building.

The stage at 180 N. Smith St. has been dark for four weeks now. Durty Nellie's, the Irish pub and concert room at the center of downtown Palatine's nightlife for more than half a century, closed on Sunday, Oct. 4. The building already has its next tenant lined up, and it's a brewery, not a music venue.

The Daily Herald was there for last call. Its headline quoted the regulars: "It's like a family here." Axios Chicago counted 54 years, and WLS-AM had the story the next day. Our own listings show it from the calendar side. We tracked 18 shows at Durty Nellie's over the past 12 months. The last was on Oct. 2, and nothing is booked after it.

According to Axios, Durty Nellie's first opened in Palatine in 1972 and moved into its longtime Smith Street home in 2003. It survived a fire in 2019, and the Daily Herald followed the rebuild while the owners worked toward reopening.

The end has been coming for a while. In April 2023 the owners announced a plan to tear down the building and put up an 85-unit apartment complex with ground-floor retail and a smaller Durty Nellie's restaurant, as ABC7 Chicago also reported. WLS-AM says that plan stalled over parking. A different deal went through instead. On Sept. 9 the Daily Herald reported that the village council had approved a special use for Big Grove Brewery at 180-190 N. Smith St. The village won't issue a liquor license until the restaurant is ready to open.

WLS-AM reports that Big Grove will remove the concert stage and won't run the space as a live music venue, so the northwest suburbs should count this as a room lost, not a room swapped for another.

The northwest suburbs have lost a room, not traded one.

That loss is bigger than one bar. Durty Nellie's was a place where the bar-band circuit met the touring club circuit. Indie and punk bills came through regularly. Dr Manhattan opened for The Front Bottoms) there in January 2014, and in 2017 the Daily Herald's weekend picks had Against Me! bringing punk to Palatine. Fan favorites kept coming back: Pat McCurdy and The Crane Wives both played it in the summer of 2015. Haley Reinhart held a benefit concert there on April 30, 2016.

That mix is what goes away. A suburban room that could book a touring punk band on Friday and a singalong regular on Saturday was hard to find out here. It was even harder to keep going through a fire, a pandemic and years of redevelopment talk. The bands that played it will find other places to play, though maybe not ones this close to the Metra platform.

If you have a Durty Nellie's night you still talk about, the first show you saw there or the last, we'd like to hear it.

Sources: Daily Herald: 'It's like a family here': Longtime customers mark last call for Durty Nellie's (Oct 4, 2026) (dailyherald.com); Axios Chicago: Durty Nellie's closes after 54 years in Palatine (Oct 5, 2026) (axios.com); WLS-AM: Durty Nellie's closes after 54 years in Palatine (Oct 6, 2026) (wlsam.com); Daily Herald: Big Grove Brewery gets green light to replace Durty Nellie's in Palatine (Sept 9, 2026) (dailyherald.com); Daily Herald: Durty Nellie's owners plan to tear down iconic nightspot in downtown Palatine (Apr 12, 2023) (dailyherald.com); ABC7 Chicago: Iconic Palatine music venue Durty Nellie's to be redeveloped into mixed-use building (abc7chicago.com); Daily Herald: Durty Nellie's moving closer to reopening after fire (Feb 6, 2019) (dailyherald.com); Daily Herald: Weekend picks: Against Me! brings punk to Palatine (Feb 24, 2017) (dailyherald.com); Wikipedia: Dr Manhattan (band) (en.wikipedia.org); Wikipedia: Haley Reinhart (en.wikipedia.org); JamBase: Pat McCurdy at Durty Nellie's, July 10, 2015 (jambase.com); JamBase: The Crane Wives at Durty Nellie's, Aug 5, 2015 (jambase.com)