Slot Machines for Bars in Brighton Park, Chicago

History

Brighton Park took its name from the Brighton livestock market in England and began as a cattle town on the edge of the city. The Illinois and Michigan Canal and Archer Avenue drew the first settlers in the 1830s, and by 1851 a small settlement stood near the plank road that became Western Avenue. Mayor Long John Wentworth opened the Brighton Race Track in 1855, a stockyard went up at Archer and Western in 1857, and the Union Stock Yard's opening in 1865 put it out of business. Industry took its place, including the Laflin and Rand powder mills, until lightning struck a powder warehouse in 1886 and residents ran the explosives trade out of the neighborhood. The Santa Fe built its Corwith Yards here in 1887, then the busiest in the nation, and the city annexed Brighton Park in 1889. Poles and Lithuanians followed the Germans and Irish into the cottages and two-flats, founding Five Holy Martyrs in 1908 and Immaculate Conception in 1914. The Crane Company plant opened in 1915 and closed in 1977, and the neighborhood lost a third of its people between 1930 and 1980 before Mexican families filled it again.

The area today

Brighton Park is a Mexican American neighborhood now, hemmed in by the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the rail yards and the old industrial belt. Corwith still works as one of BNSF's four Chicago-area intermodal terminals, its truck gate on Kedzie. Archer Avenue is the commercial spine, with the library branch that opened in 1969 and, under the 47th Street viaduct, a mural that ties the neighborhood to Archer Heights. Five Holy Martyrs, at 43rd and Richmond, is where Pope John Paul II said Mass in the parking lot on October 5, 1979; the parish repeats an outdoor Mass each October, and a stretch of 43rd Street is named Pope John Paul II Drive. Kelly Park on 41st Street, across from Kelly High School, honors Mayor Edward J. Kelly, who sold newspapers here as a boy. The Orange Line runs along the south edge, with the Kedzie stop at 49th.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Archer, you know the strip runs on food first: taquerias and carnitas counters that pour a beer with the plate, a sports lounge, a banquet hall. Kedzie on both sides of Archer keeps the old corner taverns beside a mariscos house. 47th Street west of Kedzie is the late block, with a pizza-and-wings room on a late-hour license and bar-and-grills that feed the shift coming off work. Western Avenue has the bigger rooms: a dance club, a seafood restaurant, a club with a kitchen. The room that works here knows the families at dinner and the neighbors after. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses.