Slot Machines for Bars in Back of the Yards, Chicago

History

The neighborhood was part of the Town of Lake until Chicago annexed it in 1889, and the blocks southwest of the Union Stock Yards became known as Back of the Yards. The yards opened on Christmas Day, 1865, and at one time meatpacking employed one out of every five working men in Chicago. By 1900 the neighborhood was a set of Slavic enclaves of Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Slovaks, mostly workingmen's cottages, each with its own church and school. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about a working family in the district, and Mexican immigrants joined the mix in the 1920s. When the Depression overwhelmed the enclaves, Joseph Meegan, superintendent of Davis Square Park, and the organizer Saul Alinsky formed the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in 1939 from the parishes, schools and clubs, under the motto "We the people will work out our own destiny." Early wins included Works Progress Administration money and a school lunch program that became a model for the nation. The yards closed in 1971, and by the mid-1970s the neighborhood was predominantly Hispanic.

The area today

Back of the Yards still thrives as a Mexican and Latino community, with remnants of its Slavic roots. Its main commercial corner is 47th and Ashland, a corridor since 1894, where a block-long former Goldblatt's department store in white terra cotta still stands. Davis Square, one of ten parks opened in 1905, keeps its fieldhouse and a boxing gym. The limestone Union Stock Yard Gate, a Chicago Landmark at Exchange and Peoria, now looks over an industrial park where the yards stood. Each year the Neighborhood Council's Fiesta Back of the Yards fills Ashland Avenue with a carnival, food and local performers. The 9 Ashland bus, with overnight service, and the 47th Street bus run through it.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on 47th Street, you know the day belongs to the panaderías and taquerías and the night to the corner taverns. The rooms run from neighborhood bars where the stools belong to regulars, to cantinas and a few newer places built around craft beer, with liquor stores sprinkled among them. Ashland Avenue is a daytime street of shoppers and errands, and the side streets hold the corner taverns where a shift crowd settles in. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses, which is public record.