Our Story

A small urban inn in Wicker Park, Chicago, named for Nelson Algren's great novel — and for the neighborhood he wrote it in. Formerly the Ruby Room

In 1949, Nelson Algren sat at a typewriter a few blocks from where you're reading this and wrote The Man with the Golden Arm — a novel about Frankie Machine, a card dealer with hands so fast the neighborhood said they were gold. It won the first National Book Award ever given. It also turned Wicker Park into a kind of literary shorthand, a place where ordinary people lived ordinary, outsized lives on ordinary, outsized streets.

That neighborhood is still here. The Polish bakeries gave way to record shops, which gave way to natural-wine bars and vintage stores, but the bones are the same. Three-flat walkups. Mosaic sidewalks. The Blue Line clattering overhead. A corner in every direction that someone, somewhere, has written a song about.

We took the name because it is, in a quiet way, the neighborhood's name. And because we wanted you to know what we are — and what we're not — before you even walked in.

We are not a conference hotel. We don't have a lobby bar, a concierge desk, a minibar, a television in every room, or a polite voice at 2 a.m. offering room service. We left those things out on purpose.

What we kept: a handful of good rooms. Proper beds. A shared kitchen where the coffee is always on. A small garden out back where the city goes quiet for a minute. A front door that opens with a code on your phone. And Milwaukee Avenue — twelve of the most walkable blocks in Chicago — thirty seconds away.

The Golden Arm is an urban inn in the classic European sense. You rent a room in a good building on a great street and the city becomes your hotel. The restaurants are your dining room. The cafes are your lobby. The 606 Trail is your garden. We simply give you a warm, quiet, beautiful place to come back to at the end of the day.

Some of you knew us as the Ruby Room. Many travelers did, for many years, and we're grateful for every one of them. The Ruby had its own specific, wonderful life — but the building kept asking to be something looser, more literary, more Wicker Park. So we listened.

Same building. Same garden. Same quiet. New name, older story.

Welcome to The Golden Arm. Pull up a chair. The coffee's on.