Brandee Neal holds a baseball bat at the Angry Cactus Lounge on Chicago’s North Side. She’s facing down an array of old consumer electronics inside one of its four concrete-walled “rage rooms.” Neal wears protective gear, including a face shield and an apron, while her friend records a video. Then she starts whaling on an old computer monitor and does not stop for half a minute.
“It was an outlet that I didn’t know I needed,” Neal says afterward. The experience is equal parts therapy and entertainment: “I’m in therapy, but […] you can’t punch your therapist in the face.”
Rage rooms are a popular sector these days. More than 500 dot the United States, according to the Rage Room Alliance, and many of them trace their roots to a Tokyo pop-up called the Venting Place, which appeared during the Great Recession around 2008. But Chicago may actually have a claim to the world’s very first rage room, nearly 50 years earlier.
In 1962, the Imperial Inn opened at Canal and Harrison streets in Downtown Chicago. To attract guests, it offered a space in the basement where patrons could release their anger by throwing breakable items at the wall: the Frustration Room.
“You would come in and there would be this sort of counter before you,” said Paul Durica, director of curation and exhibitions at the Chicago History Museum. “It would be laid out with all of these different household objects — lamps, plates, bowls, light bulbs — and in front of you would be basically a steel-plated wall, and you were encouraged just to kind of let loose and throw things at the wall.”
Who thought this place up and why did it disappear? Curious City looked into the Frustration Room’s origins and found its emergence coincided with a changing domestic travel landscape.
The Frustration Room
The idea of putting a gimmick like a rage room inside a hotel or motel is not as far afield as one might assume, according to Mark E. Young, hotel historian and director of the Hospitality Industry Archive at the Hilton College University of Houston.
“To me, the best gimmick ever is the DoubleTree chocolate chip cookie,” a treat which has greeted guests at the hotel chain since 1986, Young said.
Like a swimming pool or a spa or a continental breakfast, the Frustration Room was an incentive to get bodies in beds. Young said the emergence of America’s new interstate highway system in the mid-20th century led to a particularly fierce period of competition.
“All the downtowns and all of the American cities were very quickly trying to figure out how they could make it easier for the people traveling by car to get to their downtown hotel, because people weren’t traveling by train anymore,” he said.
Edward Rebbe of Skokie, Illinois, relaxing in the Frustration Room of the Imperial Inn at Harrison and Canal in Chicago, July 13, 1962. After driving all day and seeing stop signs etc., he can come into the Frustration Room and smash dishes and light bulbs to release stress.
ST-17654953, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum
The Frustration Room was originally decorated with traffic signs and marketed at drivers who were frustrated by this new standard of getting around.
“Even today in the 21st century, driving is deeply frustrating,” Durica said. “So, on the one hand, it’s a gimmick, but on the other hand, it seems to be recognizing a real sort of psychic need.”
If your frustrations ran deeper than the traffic, the Imperial Inn offered a variety of other targets. Visitors could throw a lamp at a photograph of President John F. Kennedy, Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater or Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union.
“The [Imperial] Inn really wanted to attract tourists, and it really wanted to attract people coming to the city for conventions,” Durica said. “[The Frustration Room] was just another selling point.”
The Imperial Inn also advertised an in-house psychiatrist, a service aimed at stressed-out executives and weary businessmen, according to one article in the San Francisco Examiner. “After all, there’s a couch in every room,” the Imperial Inn’s general manager said.
“Purportedly, if you got too worked up in the Frustration Room, they had a straitjacket and a couch where you could basically calm down a little bit,” Durica said. “So, it seems like the whole ethos of the Imperial Inn was one around kind of like, ballyhoo and trying to get people excited by just doing quasi ridiculous things.”
As far as publicity stunts go, this one seemed to work, at least temporarily. Newspapers across the country picked up the story of this new Chicago motel with a space to “ease tension for travelers,” including the Pittsburgh Press, the D.C. Star and even Time magazine.
Local journalists checked it out too. In a column titled “Frustration Room Really Works,” John Justin Smith of the Chicago Daily News describes the release one feels when throwing a light bulb against a wall: “The missile goes boom. And you, somehow, feel better.”
Who thought of this place?
Available evidence from old newspaper reports suggests that the Frustration Room came from the mind of Harry Linsky, a local interior designer from Wayne County, Michigan.
Linsky often did interior design for hotels, but he took on quirkier projects too, such as sets for a group of local artists who liked to publicly read the plays of George Bernard Shaw. He got one gig decorating the executive offices of the Chicago White Sox and another designing a dining room at the governor’s mansion in Springfield.
Linsky was also an inventor of unsuccessful products, including a horizontal refrigerator and a wall-to-wall mattress.
During the publicity campaign surrounding the Frustration Room, he attempted to bring the gag to Florida. An article in the Miami News on July 23, 1962, claimed that Linsky copyrighted the idea for the Frustration Room and was making it available to other businesses.
“Despite all my rage”
The Imperial Inn became a Ramada Inn in the late 1960s. Today, it’s a Holiday Inn & Suites, and there’s no accompanying rage room, according to the general manager.
It’s unclear when exactly the Frustration Room was no longer a place people could visit to smash their blues away. Advertisements for “the world’s only Frustration Room” appeared in newspapers and hotel reference books until at least 1966. At least one customer recalls visiting as late as 1970. But the Imperial Inn had other problems.
“It seems like the Imperial Inn had a very challenging sort of run,” Durica said. “They’re very clearly desperate and keen on getting people in.”
He pointed to evidence of management turning over at the Imperial Inn just a year after it opened. A Chicago Tribune exposé pointed to the business taking questionable loans from the Teamsters union in the mid-1960s, and Durica also found evidence of police gambling raids there in the same timeframe.
“By the late 1960s, it’s not the Imperial Inn anymore. It’s the Ramada,” Durica said. “And at that point, is there a Frustration Room? I don’t know. It just kind of vanishes from the record.”
Though the Frustration Room is gone, it has plenty of next of kin. Chicago and the suburbs have rage room businesses on offer, and the Chicago Scream Club meets on summer Sunday nights at the North Avenue Beach pier.
Experts — including Dr. Sheila Dowd, associate director at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago — warn against using rage rooms as a replacement for therapy.
“That experience is very momentary. It’s one little snapshot,” Dowd said. “There’s no evidence that that benefit you get would continue.”
But if you’re there to have fun? Go for it — just don’t knock yourself out.
More about our question-asker
Alan Dachman, an artist living in Evanston, said he had fond memories of visiting the Frustration Room.
“It was kind of cleansing, even though I didn’t really need to be cleansed,” he said. “But it was still worth the time and worth the fun. And there were a lot of laughs.”
Dachman said when he visited between 1968 and 1970, the space was decorated in psychedelic artwork, not traffic signs, with two massive steel slabs serving as targets for glass bottles.
“I wasn’t truly frustrated […] but I can’t deny that it was invigorating,” he said. “Often there weren’t a lot of people, but one of the times, there were a whole bunch of people. Everybody was flinging these bottles together. It was truly symphonic.”
Dachman remembers the space attracting a diverse crowd of guests, all there to have fun.
“There was a lot of coming together of human beings in a nice way that, particularly nowadays, I kind of miss it,” he said.