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Joe Mantegna Celebrates Street Named In His Honor

By Ted Cox | May 4, 2017 5:35am
 Actor Joe Mantegna looks up at his honorary street sign after unveiling it at the foot of the River Shannon bar in the building where he used to live.
Actor Joe Mantegna looks up at his honorary street sign after unveiling it at the foot of the River Shannon bar in the building where he used to live.
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DNAinfo/Ted Cox

LINCOLN PARK — Actor Joe Mantegna accepted a street named in his honor at Armitage and Hudson avenues Wednesday, saying it could have turned out very different.

"At my age, there's a good chance I could have had my name on a wall in Washington, D.C.," Mantegna said, referencing the Vietnam War Memorial.

Instead, the 69-year-old Tony Award-winning star of "Glengarry Glen Ross" on Broadway, and more recently, "Criminals Minds" on CBS, was unveiling a sign for Joe Mantegna Way outside 425 W. Armitage Ave., a building he lived in above the River Shannon bar in his formative days as an actor.

"Good things happen to good people," Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey said in presenting Mantegna with a resolution in his honor.

Ald. Michele Smith (43rd) presented Mantegna with a city resolution as well after sponsoring the honorary street sign — one of the last given to a living person after the City Council changed the rules for the signs in February.

The paperwork was already in on Mantegna's sign at that point, however, after River Shannon owner Lyn McKeaney got the process started last year as the bar celebrated its 70th anniversary.

Smith singled out Mantegna's role in developing the Organic Theater, which helped launch the city's wave of neighborhood companies in the '70s with the world premiere of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and Mantegna's own "Bleacher Bums," co-written with other ensemble members in a fond tip of the cap to long-suffering Cubs fans.

Smith also cited how the Goodman School of Drama that Mantegna attended is now the DePaul University Theatre School.

Mantegna went on to star in Mamet's movies "House of Games" and "Things Change," as well as "The Godfather Part III."

He's also given voice to the recurring mobster Fat Tony on "The Simpsons."

"I've had a beautiful, wonderful life," Mantegna said.

But he also couldn't resist a self-deprecating Chicago joke when he stepped out of the limo that dropped him at the event.

Looking up at his old third-floor apartment, he remarked: "I forgot my keys."