Slot Machines for Bars in Albany Park, Chicago

History

Albany Park was farmland until Richard Rusk, starting from ten acres bought in 1868, built a large farm with a brickyard on the North Branch of the Chicago River and a race track. Chicago annexed it with the rest of Jefferson Township in 1889. In 1893 a syndicate that included DeLancy Louderback and Charles T. Yerkes bought 640 acres of the McAllister farm, and Louderback named it for his hometown, Albany, New York. The partners brought the transit: streetcars on Lawrence Avenue by 1896 and the Ravenswood Elevated to Kimball and Lawrence by 1907, the year the Sanitary District finished straightening the North Branch. Commerce clustered at the terminal, and builders put up bungalows and two-flats through the 1910s and 1920s. Germans and Swedes came first; after 1912 Russian Jews moved up from the Near West Side, and the area stayed largely Jewish through the 1950s. After the war those families left for Lincolnwood and Skokie, and by the 1970s seven of every ten commercial properties on Lawrence Avenue stood vacant. A 1978 push by the city, the North River Commission and the Lawrence Avenue Development Corporation rebuilt the streetscape and storefronts, and Korean merchants led the avenue's comeback.

The area today

The Brown Line still ends where the boom began: Kimball is the terminal, with Kedzie and Francisco the last stops before it. Lawrence Avenue carries the honorary name Seoul Drive for the Korean-owned shops that lined it, and the area counts among the most ethnically and linguistically diverse in the city, with large Mexican, Guatemalan and Korean American communities. Our Lady of Mercy parish dates to 1911. Ravenswood Manor, the subdivision William Harmon started selling in 1909 from an office by the Francisco stop, runs between Lawrence and Montrose along the river. River Park on Francisco Avenue, where the North Shore Channel meets the North Branch, opened on July 4, 1920; Eugene Field Park on Ridgeway keeps Clarence Hatzfeld's 1928 fieldhouse, home to the Albany Park Theater Project. North Park University has been on Foster Avenue since 1894.

Bars and restaurants here

Kedzie from Lawrence south toward Montrose is the Persian and Middle Eastern strip: a kabob house open since 1977, bakeries, markets and kitchens with late-night menus and tables set for big parties. Lawrence west of Kedzie mixes Korean restaurants with Mexican and Guatemalan kitchens and grocers, and the stretch east toward the river picked up new rooms in 2024, a sports bar among them. Commuters off the Brown Line at Kimball feed the blocks around the terminal. The North River Commission's Flavors of Albany Park restaurant crawl, held in August 2021, ran three walking routes through these streets, and its Montrose route covers the quieter Ravenswood Manor end, wine bar included.