Chicago's famous Rat Hole left its perch at City Hall on Wednesday night for a one-night-only appearance at the United Center, where the Smashing Pumpkins put the fabled concrete slab on display during their homecoming concert. Fans were invited to visit the venue's Center Atrium and snap photos with the slab from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. before the city quietly returned it to the 11th floor of City Hall the next day.
The band brought out the slab during its stop on the Rats in a Cage Tour, according to Block Club Chicago. The outlet reports that the United Center's team reached out to the city and asked whether there was any possibility of displaying the Rat Hole for the show, though it was unclear whether the band was behind the request. City officials said the request fit the moment, since the tour's title practically begged for the appearance of Chicago's most famous rodent-adjacent landmark.
The slab has not exactly been living a glamorous life since its fame peaked. It had been encased and preserved at City Hall since January 2025, under the ownership of the Streets and Sanitation Department, Block Club Chicago reports. Before that, it spent years as an unremarkable patch of sidewalk near 1918 W. Roscoe St. in Roscoe Village, removed from its original spot in April 2024 after the attention surrounding it became too much for the block to handle.
How a Sidewalk Divot Became a Chicago Icon
The whole saga traces back to a 2024 social media post, after which the imprint drew widespread attention in Chicago and well beyond, per Block Club Chicago's reporting. What had simply been a patch of sidewalk for years turned into a bona fide tourist attraction, drawing crowds that disrupted what had been a quiet residential street, as the outlet noted in a follow-up piece a year after the frenzy began.
Here is the twist that gives the whole legend its edge: the Rat Hole almost certainly was not made by a rat at all. Researchers concluded with nearly 99 percent likelihood that the impression was left by either an eastern grey squirrel or a fox squirrel, according to the New York Times. A companion study published in Biology Letters pegged the odds even more precisely, estimating a 98.67 percent chance that the city's most famous rat was actually a squirrel, according to Science.org.
That determination didn't come easy. Researchers gathered measurements from 50 museum specimens representing each of Chicago's eight rodent species before reaching their conclusion, per the same account. The imprint matched eastern gray squirrels and fox squirrels nearly equally well, with the gray squirrel ultimately favored simply because it's more common around the city. It's a scientific footnote that would have seemed almost beside the point back when neighbors on Roscoe Street were still arguing it out themselves — squirrel theories were already part of the Rat Hole discussion in January 2024.
A Rare Loan for a Fitting Occasion
City officials made clear the Rat Hole isn't something that gets passed around for just any occasion. While it isn't typically loaned out, the city indicated that certain special occasions may be considered, Block Club Chicago reports — and a concrete slab shaped like a rodent silhouette heading to a show literally called Rats in a Cage apparently cleared that bar. The city handled transporting the slab both to and from the United Center itself, underscoring just how delicate the operation was for what is, after all, just an oddly shaped chunk of sidewalk.
The tour's name carries its own layer of Chicago-band trivia. Rats in a Cage references the lyric “Despite all my rage/I am still just a rat in a cage,” from the Smashing Pumpkins song Bullet with Butterfly Wings, which appeared on the band's 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The United Center stop doubled as a homecoming show for the band, and the crowd treated it that way: per a review from Consequence, the marathon 30-song split set turned the arena into a roaring chorus as fans sang along to nearly every Mellon Collie track.
The United Center did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the display, according to Block Club Chicago's reporting. For now, the slab is back where it has sat since early last year — 11 floors up at City Hall, encased and out of reach, with its night under the arena lights already behind it.
