Slot Machines for Bars in Austin, Chicago

History

Austin began in 1865, when developer Henry Austin bought 470 acres between Chicago Avenue and Madison Street, Laramie to Austin Boulevard, for a temperance settlement he called Austinville. Suburban trains brought nearly 1,000 residents by 1874, and by the 1890s Austin was the largest settlement in Cicero Township, and in 1899 the rest of the township voted it out and into Chicago. By 1920 streetcars ran downtown every half mile, the busiest the Madison Street Green Hornet, and commerce lined Madison, Chicago Avenue and Lake Street under the L. Germans and Scandinavians came first, then Irish and Italian families who built a half-dozen Catholic parishes, and the community counted 130,000 people by 1930. In 1929 the neighborhood built a Georgian Revival hall modeled on Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a park district fieldhouse that is sometimes called Austin Town Hall. Brick two-flats and bungalows filled the north, three-flats and courtyard buildings the south. The old village core survives in the Midway Park district north of Central and Lake, in Frank Lloyd Wright's 1903 J.J. Walser House at 42 N. Central, and in the 1869 Seth Warner House at 631 N. Central, the oldest surviving house in Austin. By 1980 Austin was a predominantly African American community.

The area today

Austin sits on Chicago's western border, and the Green Line runs above Lake Street with stops at Cicero, Laramie, Central and Austin. Chicago Avenue from Cicero to Austin Boulevard is the Soul City Corridor, named in 2019 by the Austin African American Business Networking Association; the city finished an $8.7 million rebuild of the street in May 2025, and the state made Soul City a cultural district the same year. The Laramie State Bank at 5200 W. Chicago Ave., an Art Deco landmark finished in 1929 and covered in terra cotta coins, beehives and squirrels, was slated for redevelopment in 2026, and Forty Acres Fresh Market is one of several Black-owned businesses on the corridor. Columbus Park, Jens Jensen's masterpiece and a National Historic Landmark, holds a nine-hole golf course, a fishing lagoon, a pool and a refectory. The Kehrein Center for the Arts on Washington Boulevard and Third City Studio on North Avenue are the newer arts anchors.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Chicago Avenue, you have watched the sidewalks widen and the benches go in, and you share the strip with Avenue Que and Kitchen, Spill the Beans and Forty Acres Fresh Market. A karaoke venue at 5234 W. Chicago Ave. and Shawn Michelle's ice cream in the Avenue Apartments were announced for the same block in 2026. Madison Street is the other commercial corridor, and Lake Street under the L has carried storefronts since the streetcar days. The corridor's backers talk about an entertainment corridor, built on the blues festivals, the chili cookoff and the Austin P.O.W.E.R. 5K that already fill the street.