Slot Machines for Bars in Douglas, Chicago

History

Stephen A. Douglas, a lawyer and politician, bought 70 acres along the lake in 1852 and built a house on East 35th Street. During the Civil War the Union army held Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas. An Illinois Central commuter stop and streetcar lines drew families of every kind: wealthy residents such as Joy Morton in Groveland Park, Jewish families who built Michael Reese Hospital in 1881, Irish workers who raised St. James Church at 29th and Wabash and helped found De La Salle Institute in 1889, and meatpacking and railroad workers in frame houses on Federal Street. Black Chicagoans followed the boulevards south, and from the 1920s through the 1940s Douglas and Grand Boulevard formed the Black Metropolis, known as Bronzeville. After the war, public housing replaced the Federal Street cottages. Michael Reese and the Illinois Institute of Technology were central to the private towers on the east side, finished by the mid-1960s. One of them, Lake Meadows, was the city's first urban renewal project and replaced a dense neighborhood of older buildings.

The area today

Illinois Tech anchors Douglas at 35th and State, and its campus holds Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, a Chicago Landmark since 1997 that hangs its roof from exposed steel trusses. East of King Drive the Lake Meadows towers stand on open green space with few through-streets, and Michael Reese Hospital, across 31st Street, has been demolished. The lakefront is Burnham Park, filled land that hosted the 1933 and 1934 World's Fair, and Margaret T. Burroughs Beach sits next to the 31st Street Harbor. The Green Line's 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station at 16 E. 35th Street is accessible, and Metra's Rock Island line is a block west. Bronze plaques honoring former Bronzeville residents are set into King Drive between 26th and 35th Streets.

Bars and restaurants here

Douglas has no main drag for bars. Campus, towers and park take up much of the ground, so the liquor-licensed rooms sit apart: restaurants on Pershing Road along the southern edge, one with a patio; a tavern on Indiana Avenue; a supermarket on King Drive; the university's own space on campus; and a lakefront restaurant by the 31st Street beach. Within walking distance are students and staff from campus, neighbors in the Lake Meadows towers and the older blocks along Indiana and King Drive, and in summer beachgoers and boaters. A room here wins regulars one block at a time.