Slot Machines for Bars in East Garfield Park, Chicago

History

East Garfield Park was annexed to Chicago in 1869, the year the state created the West Park Commission and set aside the ground for Central Park, one of three big West Side parks tied together by boulevards. Speculators subdivided the blocks around it, built nothing, and left after the fire of 1871. The West Park Board largely ignored William Le Baron Jenney's designs, and real landscaping waited until Jens Jensen took charge in 1905. By then it carried the name of President James A. Garfield, given in 1881 after his assassination.

The Lake Street Elevated opened in 1893 and drew stores and two-flats along its tracks, while the railroads on its edges drew factories west, most notably the Sears plant on the North Lawndale border. Irish and German families came first, then Italians and Russian Jews. After the First World War the Madison-Crawford shopping district spilled east along Madison Street, and the Graemere residential hotel opened just east of the park. The Congress Expressway cut away the south end in the 1950s, Black families crowded out of the South and Near West Sides moved in, and the 1968 riots along Madison Street left burned buildings that were not replaced.

The area today

The park is still the reason most outsiders come. The Garfield Park Conservatory at 300 N. Central Park Ave., Jens Jensen's "landscape art under glass," opened in 1908 under a roof shaped like a haystack and holds about two acres under glass and a dozen acres of gardens outside. Down Central Park Avenue, the Gold Dome went up in 1928 as the West Park Commission's headquarters, became the park's field house in 1934 and was made a Chicago Landmark in 2009. The Green Line rides above Lake Street on the north edge, stopping at Conservatory-Central Park Drive, whose station house came from the old Homan stop on the original 1893 line, and at Kedzie, where the Hatchery food incubator opened in 2018 with shared kitchens for roughly a hundred start-ups. The Blue Line's Kedzie-Homan stop sits on the expressway at the south edge.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Madison Street, you know the gaps between storefronts; the City is marketing its own vacant lots there, and its corridor study opened with a meeting at the Gold Dome. The rooms are taverns and grills, plus a turkey-sandwich shop at 2912 W. Madison that opened in 2023. On Lake Street under the Green Line, the tavern at St. Louis Avenue now has the neighborhood's first freestanding coffee shop across the street, and the Hatchery at Kedzie turns out new food businesses. Sit-down dining is scarce; a planned food hall at Jackson and Homan would be one of the few.