Slot Machines for Bars in Bronzeville, Chicago

History

Bronzeville was a name chosen on purpose. The major media called the South Side's Black community the "Black Belt," a label many residents resented, and James J. Gentry, theater editor at Anthony Overton's Chicago Bee, suggested his own coined word instead. The Bee sponsored an unsuccessful Mayor of Bronzeville contest in 1930. Gentry took the idea to the Chicago Defender in 1932, where it grew into one of the paper's most profitable promotions, and Cora Carroll, a businesswoman, was Mayor of Bronzeville in the 1960s.

The district filled in during the Great Migration, when thousands of Black Southerners arrived between 1910 and 1920 for industrial jobs, and it became a city within a city of Black-owned businesses and institutions. On State Street, the Overton Hygienic Building, put up in 1922 and 1923, held Overton's cosmetics company and Douglass National Bank, the first nationally chartered bank owned by African Americans, and the Art Deco Chicago Bee Building, built between 1929 and 1931, housed his newspaper. At 35th and King Drive, the Victory Monument, dedicated on Armistice Day 1928, honors the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an African-American unit that served in France in World War I. The Depression halted building. A 1945 sociological study fixed the name "Black Metropolis" on the district, and in 1998 the City made its nine surviving structures a Chicago Landmark district.

The area today

The Green Line serves Bronzeville at 35th-Bronzeville-IIT, where the Metra Rock Island line is one block west and the Illinois Tech campus dominates the corner of 35th and State, and at the 47th Street station. Bronze plaques honoring former residents line King Drive between 26th and 35th Streets. At 47th and King, the Harold Washington Cultural Center opened in 2004 on a corner that had sat empty since the Regal Theater was demolished in 1973. The Chicago Bee Building has been a public library branch since 1996, and the South Side Community Art Center stands at 3831 S. Michigan. The annual Bud Billiken Parade moves through Washington Park.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on 47th Street, you know how the strip runs: a gallery with a liquor license, a neighborhood bar with a small dance floor, and a crab shack for dinner. On King Drive, a tavern with a patio sits among the Southern kitchens of King Drive and Michigan Avenue. On Cottage Grove, the Bronzeville Winery opened in 2022 in a storefront of the 4400 Grove mixed-use development. Along the same street you also find a Southern kitchen, a pizza shop and an ice cream and board game cafe.