Slot Machines for Bars in Bucktown, Chicago

History

The name Bucktown is traced to goats, kept by Polish settlers according to local tradition, though the story is undocumented. The settlement here was called Holstein, an enclave of laborers and craftsmen from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. Milwaukee Avenue was then the Northwestern Plank Road, and by the 1840s a hotel called the Powell House stood on it at Armitage. Brickmaking began near Webster in that decade and surged after the Great Chicago Fire, and many residents worked at the Chicago Carriage and Wagon Factory near Milwaukee and North. Polish immigration swelled from the 1870s until World War I, with parishes forming out of St. Stanislaus Kostka, the city's first Polish Catholic parish, founded in 1867. Street names changed from Polish to German and then, during the war, to names like McLean, Shakespeare and Palmer. In the 1890s the City raised the street grade, and houses were jacked up onto new foundations. The Encyclopedia of Chicago calls the area a Polish working-class district of small homes, saloons and churches.

The area today

Holstein Park, on Oakley Avenue, has a brick fieldhouse that opened in 1912, and the Bucktown Arts Fest, a community art fair begun in the early 1980s by four local artists, was held there in late August 2025. The red brick church of St. Mary of the Angels, completed in 1920, has a white dome that can be seen from the Kennedy Expressway. Above the streets, the 606 trail runs on the Bloomingdale rail embankments raised between 1910 and 1913 and connects Bucktown with Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and Logan Square. The CTA reopened the 1895 Damen Blue Line station in December 2014 after a rebuild, and Ald. Joe Moreno described it at the time as vital to both Bucktown and Wicker Park. Vienna Beef moved its corporate offices into its former factory at 2501 N. Damen.

Bars and restaurants here

On Damen Avenue, TRUCE, a cocktail and coffee bar, opened at 1935 N. Damen in May 2024 in the former home of 6 Degrees tavern, and Cafe Gimme, an all-day cafe that pours cocktails and wine, opened at 2115 N. Damen in July 2026. On Western Avenue, Chez Poulet, a French rotisserie chicken restaurant at 2234 N. Western, was reported open in August 2026, in the former home of the original Taqueria Chingón.