Slot Machines for Bars in Ashburn, Chicago

History

Chicago annexed the Town of Lake, which included this land, in 1889, and the railroads followed. A developer platted Clarkdale, the original subdivision here, in 1893 along the Chicago & Grand Trunk Railway, betting that the World's Columbian Exposition would bring buyers. Growth was slow. By 1894 Dutch, Swedish and Irish settlers had built only 30 homes, and eleven years later just 18 more stood.

Ashburn Flying Field opened in 1916 as Chicago's first airport and served as a Signal Corps training camp in World War I. Marshy ground, the cost of draining it and the field's remoteness cost it its airmail contracts, and interest faded after Chicago Municipal Airport, later Midway, opened in the 1920s. The field stayed open until 1939.

In 1952 the former airfield was subdivided by builder Raymond Lutgert, who named the Scottsdale community for his son. Industrial growth in the late 1940s had set off rapid home building, and for two decades the prairie gave way to houses. Ashburn counted 47,161 residents in 1970, its peak, and the site's prairie plants were transplanted to Marquette Park.

The area today

Ashburn is a residential community on Chicago's Southwest Side. Hayes Park opened in 1957 as Ashburn Park and was renamed in the 1970s for Father Francis Hayes, who founded St. Thomas More Parish in 1946; it has a fieldhouse, a pool and ball fields. Durkin Park, named in 1962 for Martin Durkin, a union president who became Secretary of Labor under Eisenhower, uses a neighboring school's gym as its fieldhouse. Scottsdale Park, on 83rd Street, dates to 1955, and its first recreation building was a remodeled temporary church. The Wrightwood-Ashburn library, dedicated in 1997, stands on Kedzie Avenue. Wrightwood, Scottsdale and Parkview took shape in the postwar boom, and Marycrest followed as a 1993 subdivision. The CTA's 53A South Pulaski bus links Pulaski Road to the Orange Line's Pulaski station.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on Pulaski Road, your neighbors are a mix: neighborhood taverns, a patio, restaurant kitchens with on-premises licenses, and a package-goods store that also holds a tavern license. Kedzie Avenue shows the same mix at a smaller scale, with a tavern and a not-for-profit club side by side and a package-goods store that also holds a tavern license. On 79th Street, a restaurant kitchen holds the same kind of on-premises license. Away from the main roads, the blocks are residential. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses.