The tournament room
The tournament room
twister said:
Check out this find I recently picked up. It's an old 4x5 negative from 1959 of Mosconi shooting a trick shot called the 'Drunken Sailor shot' (?) at a pool hall located at 29 W Randolph in Chicago, and lo and behold, the pool hall just happens to be the one and only Bensinger's, where it relocated to after it moved from its previous Wabash address and before it moved to the North side. (Pretty sure that's right, but feel free to correct me.) It's pretty rare to find original photos in good condition of well-known pool and billiard players this old, let alone negatives. The photo here is a jpeg from a scan I did of the negative. Anyways, just thought some of you Chicagoans and fellow pool lovers would enjoy it.
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29 W Randolph is correct. I attended many of Mosconi's exhibitions at the old Bensingers. In 1959 I was in the US Army in Germany.
A few facts: that bad air was not present in this version of Bensingers. The bad air joint was in a basement on N Clark from 1962 on. "Dank air and musty netherworld," was a fabulous description of that Bensingers by Grady Mathews.
This was the do-dad Bensingers, and was situated not in a cellar but on the 6th floor. The tournament/exhibition room had a floor all to itself, and this is where that pic was taken. A billiard and a pool table were surrounded by bleachers with theater seats.
In its glory days this Bensingers had one whole floor devoted to Billiard tables, another to pool, another to snooker, one for exhibitions, and finally one whole floor for bowling.
Beard
It was at one of those Mosconi exhibs that I had the displeasure of seeing him miss a ball, and then launch his cuestick like a spear into the wall.