Slot Machines for Bars in Chinatown, Chicago

History

Chicago's first Chinatown was downtown, on South Clark Street between Harrison and Van Buren. In 1910 and 1911 Loop landlords tried to raise rents, and businessmen of the On Leong Merchants Association bought property along 22nd Street, now Cermak Road, and began the move south. The City's landmark record says the association was instrumental in creating Chinatown in 1912. Its headquarters at 2216 S. Wentworth, built in the 1920s to designs by Michaelsen and Rognstad, with pagoda towers, held meeting halls, a school, a shrine and the association's offices. The City designated it a Chicago Landmark in 1993, and it is now the Pui Tak Center.

The Dan Ryan Expressway took Hardin Square and Stanford Park, the only parks nearby, and two generations of children in Chinatown grew up without one. Ping Tom, a lifelong resident, formed the Chinese American Development Corporation in 1984, and it turned a 32-acre rail yard into Chinatown Square, on Archer Avenue.

The area today

The heart of the neighborhood is still Cermak and Wentworth, where the Chinatown Gate, built in 1975, stands on Wentworth just south of Cermak and carries a Chinese inscription that reads "The World is for All." The Cermak-Chinatown Red Line station at 138 W. Cermak Road is elevated, and the Nine Dragon Wall stands just west of it. Wentworth is Old Chinatown; Archer Avenue and Chinatown Square, a two-level open courtyard with twelve bronze zodiac statues, are New Chinatown. Ping Tom Memorial Park, on the South Branch, has a pagoda-style pavilion, a boathouse that rents kayaks in summer and a fieldhouse at 1700 S. Wentworth with an indoor pool, completed in 2013. The Chinatown branch library, a two-story building with a feng shui-influenced interior, opened in 2015. Restaurants and bakeries fill the blocks between, and for many, the night runs from dinner to karaoke.

Bars and restaurants here

Along Wentworth you run a restaurant first: most liquor licenses here are incidental to the kitchen, whether the specialty is hot pot or dumplings. The karaoke rooms sit upstairs or on a lower level along Wentworth, Cermak and 24th Street, and they take the crowd after dinner. On Archer Avenue and China Place, the kitchens run regional: Sichuan, barbecue, ramen, shabu. Chinatown's first cocktail bar, by its owners' account, opened on Cermak in 2022, tucked behind a restaurant the co-owner's parents bought in 1995. Its owners describe themselves as one stop in a night that also takes in dinner elsewhere and karaoke.