Slot Machines for Bars in Archer Heights, Chicago

History

Archer Heights takes its name from Archer Road, and the road took its name from William B. Archer, a commissioner of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which ran beside it. The canal ran where the Stevenson Expressway runs now. Until after 1900 most of the land here stayed swamp, soggy prairie and a few farms, and annexation to Chicago in 1889 changed little. The "Heights" came from the name of an early subdivision; the ground is as flat as anywhere in the region. After 1900 speculators developed the southern sections for housing, and Archer Avenue had horsecars in the 1890s and electric streetcars by 1906, which helped draw immigrant laborers: Poles in the largest numbers, then Italians, Lithuanians, Czechs and Russian Jews.

Population grew fastest between 1920 and 1930, the decade that gave the area St. Bruno parish in 1925 and St. Richard in 1928. The Archer Heights Civic Association, formed in 1938, is described by the Encyclopedia of Chicago as the oldest neighborhood organization on the Southwest Side. In the 1930s and 1940s industrial and commercial growth overtook housing. Industry, starting in the Crawford Industrial District, eventually covered about two-thirds of the area, including the Kenwood Manufacturing District and the Santa Fe piggyback yard, and manufacturing and transport, Midway Airport among them, employed many residents. Commercial strips formed along Pulaski Road, Archer Avenue and 47th Street.

The area today

Archer Heights sits between Brighton Park and Garfield Ridge, with the Stevenson Expressway as its northern border. Pulaski and Archer are lined with restaurants, the northwest corner is factories and warehouses, and near Midway Airport the sound of airplanes reaches most of the neighborhood. A community that was 8 percent Hispanic in the 1990s had around 13,000 residents in a June 2020 community data snapshot reported by WTTW, roughly 77 percent of them Hispanic or Latino. The Polish presence holds on: the Polish Highlanders Alliance, founded in Chicago in 1929, hosts banquets and its festival at Dom Podhalan, 4808 S. Archer. The Orange Line, opened in 1993 between Midway and the Loop, stops at Pulaski, where the 53A and 62 buses meet it. Curie Metropolitan High School sits on Archer Avenue, Archer Park at 49th and Kilbourn added a fieldhouse in 1970, and St. Bruno on Harding, founded in 1925 for Polish immigrants, has offered Masses in English, Polish and Spanish.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Archer Avenue, your neighbors are mariscos houses, cantinas and the Highlanders' hall. On Pulaski, kitchens and taverns share the street with one late-hour room that has music and dance. On 47th Street west of Pulaski it is taverns, a sports bar and a banquet hall. Some establishments here have applied with the state, a matter of public record.