The Death of a Big Ten College Town

CULTURE

Evanston is Officially Down to Zero Bars

By Barry Weiss · June 12, 2026 · 10 min read

My nephew Alex is huge. 6'6", 230 lbs. Not doughy, just huge. He fills a room like a vintage refrigerator, but his personality is even bigger. He’s the most bombastic, opinionated, loud, self-assured person you’ve ever met. He’s also a diehard Trump supporter.

Alex grew up in a New York City suburb. Liberal, but the kind of place where Trumpers are tolerated. Everyone is with the same 150 kids from kindergarten to senior year. Alex applied to Northwestern University. Everyone in his high school knew about his politics but didn't bring it up around him because he was such a verbose, combative person.

When I found out he was getting into Northwestern, I pushed for him to attend. It was a great “work hard, play hard” school. The best academics in the Big Ten, but with high-level sports, Greek life, and midwestern state school qualities. Frats. Brats. Beer. Football in the snow. I promised him that when my own Big Ten alma mater came to Evanston to play the Wildcats, I would come visit.

Evanston in 2007

During college, I drove the four hours North from Indiana University up into Illinois and Lake Michigan where Northwestern sits. Evanston, an iconic suburb on Chicago’s North Shore.

My friend’s frat brothers were normal, nice white guys from all over the country. Coming from Indiana University, which I contend can out-party any school in the USA, I was actually impressed by how hard the NU kids went. We spent most of the weekend at a bar known colloquially as "Hundo." The head bartender/manager/mascot was a 5'5 roided up Italian kid everyone called "Tony G." He claimed to be the owner and a Northwestern student (no fucking way this was true). The bouncers had to constantly restrain his roid rage. He called every guy "a fucking cunt" and every girl "cupcake." Students loved him.

The football game was a normal Big Ten experience. Definitely a smaller affair than going to the Big House (Michigan) or the Horseshoe (Ohio State), but very similar to other Big Ten football games at schools like Indiana or Purdue. The tailgates revolved around the frat houses. Students tailgating more for the party than for the game. Loud music, mud from spilled beer, undergrads getting so sloppy they couldn’t make it to the game. All in all, Northwestern brought it.

Both Northwestern and Indiana were subpar that year, and IU lost by a field goal. Didn’t matter. At the game, I made out with a half-Jewish half-Irish, pretty-faced thick-trunked girl named Erin and that was the score that mattered. The walk back to the frat was typical Big Ten post-game where the campus has trash and furniture all over the place, like a West African Liberation army pillaged the place. Northwestern was great. Evanston was a Big Ten college town.

Evanston in 2021

Nephew Alex had a rough start at Northwestern. Peak Woke. COVID and masking. An outspoken, enormous white Trumper had a target on his back, kicked out of his frat right after pledging because of his right-wing politics. In an econ discussion with a graduate teacher’s assistant, he brought up politics. During the next lecture, an Asian girl goes up to the teacher and whispers something. They glance at Alex. Ten minutes into the class, the professor stops the lecture. He tells Alex, stuffed in a lecture hall chair he’s too big for, to leave. Alex was also banned from the Hillel House, “a safe space for Jewish students.” The student president of the Hillel and the Executive Director co-signed a letter that Alex "made students from other [Muslim] faiths feel uncomfortable" and that it “goes against Northwestern Hillel's mission of cultural outreach.”

To be fair, Alex is known to exaggerate, so I rolled my eyes at some of this, knowing that his disagreeableness was surely to blame for at least some of it. His biggest, most preposterous claim was "I don't think you understand, there are no white people on campus." That sounded really crazy. During my 2007 visit, it was very much white, so I looked it up:

White 28%, Asian 22%, Hispanic 16%, International 15%, Black 11%, Other 8%.

Okay, so way less white than I thought, but 30% isn't atrocious. Plus colleges are super woke and I am sure they love to lie about this stuff. They are probably considering some kid who was 75% Irish American but had one Spanish (from Spain) grandparent "Hispanic." Regardless, there still had to be thousands of white kids at the college. Right?

Evanston in 2024

I get in Friday morning and meet Alex at his apartment building a few blocks from school. Big elevator building with a doorman, supposedly the nicest apartment building near campus. A place where previously the JAPiest seniors from Dalton and the WASPiest seniors from Taft lived. The building was very nice and relatively new. The first thing I noticed was that the entire apartment complex population was Asian. They look young, but Asians generally do. No idea if grad students or freshmen. They traveled in packs of three to five in and out of the building and to and from the elevator. A few speak English, but the vast majority are screaming at each other like cooks in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.

Alex meets me in the lobby. "It's nice and new, but why'd you choose the Asian building?" I ask. He rolled his eyes, pointed to the dog one Asian student had on a leash and said loud enough for a dozen Asians to hear, “Where else can you get fresh General Tso’s canine?” Alex being Alex.

I hadn't seen the campus in 17 years, so I asked for a tour.

We walk under the famous arch, known cleverly and midwesternly as “The Arch,” now adorned in a giant “Black Lives Matter” banner with rainbow flags all over it. On campus it is immediately apparent: there are almost no white people. The 28% supposedly white student body seriously looks closer to 8%. Feels 75% Asian and Indian. It is too hard to tell while walking around if they are Asians from Fort Lee or Indians from Karachi. And despite what they tell you, these internationals did not become American the second they set foot in the country. They don’t throw footballs. They don’t pound beers. They don’t smoke weed on the grass and strum acoustic guitars. “For the white man, his indulgence is in his pub and his football. For the Asian, his indulgence is his work.”

Then there are the 10% blacks. Only black girls walking solo (no black guys anywhere). Scowls on their faces, projecting a hostility and a bone to pick with Western Civilization. The same nappy bohemian haircut that really accentuates the blackness of their very black upbringing, while in reality they were uniformly Oreos back home. Many had a slight underbite, a signature physiognomy of the black militant nerd girl for some reason only a Twitter racist could explain. Baggy jeans and long sleeve t-shirts—the same sort of commitment to unattractiveness as their art-ho compatriots, but with cheaper clothing. We walked around campus and played a game we called "normal white person": no gays, purple haireds, or ambiguously swarthies.

We saw sparingly few, and Alex tells me the ones we did see are athletes. She’s on the volleyball team. Baseball player. She’s on the field hockey team. He’s a swimmer. I ask why he can't be friends with the athletes. "They kinda do their own thing always at the gym or at practice and they aren't exactly here because of their academic prowess so they are also constantly studying." He says he is friends with a few but only tangentially. In an hour and a half, we see exactly four non-athlete, “normal whites.”

Along with the total absence of white people is, again, the total absence of white people behavior. The confusing thing is neither Alex nor I can tell if we’re supposed to notice this or not. Is this the world woke wants? Is it supposed to be culturally flat? Or is it supposed to be exactly what Northwestern was in 2007… only with different colors?

Regardless, the coloring killed the culture. The Northwestern Wildcats, while not always a great football team, are an absolute Big Ten institution, so much so that the local public high school calls its team the Wildkits, as in the little Wildcats. Evanston, for all its liberal intelligence, tempered it and counterbalanced it with a strong commitment to the simplicity of beer and football. This is what it means to be a midwesterner, and certainly a member of the Big Ten. But now, it’s gone. I don’t want this to be true, it simply is.

The campus tour is over and we walk to get dinner in Downtown Evanston. Naturally, I ask for Hundo. It’s not there. Replaced by a slop high rise. Okay, any sports bar? This is Chicago and Big Ten country, after all. Alex says they don’t exist anymore. I don’t believe him. So we started wandering around Evanston. Nothing. No sports bars. Hipster coffee shops, chain restaurants, it's ridiculous: there are no sports bars left.

Now let me just say, you’re probably thinking right now that this is anecdotal, and that I have shown myself not to be a serious journalist, and thus my reportage about the total lack of sports bars in Evanston, Illinois, is to be dismissed. But you’d be wrong. It’s real. Nobody writes about it because writing about it would be racist, and Evanston is the White Guilt capital of the Universe. So I sent my friend back there to verify my observation. He walked the streets of Evanston on a Thursday night in search of a sports bar, or a college bar of any kind, overflowing with college kids in the way Big Ten schools should be. Here was his report:

“The entire downtown was basically closed by 10 PM. The bar I was sitting at, Prairie Moon, kicked me out at 10, and anyway, it was already empty. I asked the bartender if there were any other bars to go to on a Thursday night and he said no, that since COVID, pretty much all the bars had closed. I wandered more. There was a pizza restaurant open that seemed to have college kids in them mostly eating pizza, it closed at 11. Then there was one solitary bar, Ridgeville Tavern, that had a light trickle of guys in it. They were almost entirely Indian. It closed at midnight.”

Lamenting our lack of a single fun bar in this supposed college town, Alex wanted to just eat at Whole Foods, but I made him go to some wing place that he warned me was terrible. It was, in fact, so terrible that even I, with the palate of a billy goat, decided after a wing and a half to not get food poisoning. We settled for dinner at Whole Foods. For lack of options, we got drinks at a hipster tapas bar, which closed at 9 PM. Evanston was dark and quiet by 10 PM on the night before a Big Ten Football game. We went to bed stone cold sober at a disgustingly reasonable hour. During my time as a college kid, this would’ve been unthinkable.

The next day at the tailgate for the game, soft music, no sign of Friday night frat parties or people nodding out in the courtyard. Sure there were some people drinking, but this was not a Big Ten college football experience by any stretch of the imagination. There were seemingly just as many people wearing IU red as there were Northwestern purple. Walking to the stadium through campus, it was as if we weren’t even going to the game, the Asians and Indians for the most part were walking with backpacks to the library. The indulgence in Evanston today is not football, but toil. Inside the stadium, as much Hoosier red as Wildcat purple. We killed Northwestern that day.