Slot Machines for Bars in East Side, Chicago

History

The park on the lake took decades to assemble. The South Park Commission bought 40 acres for Calumet Park in 1904, opened the beach and a few playfields through temporary improvements, and kept enlarging the park by purchase and landfill until it reached about 180 acres. Its cast-concrete fieldhouse was finished in 1924, with sculptural friezes by Frederick Hibbard.

Steel shaped the neighborhood behind the park. Republic Steel, a major employer, dismissed half its workers in the 1980s. Mexican families began arriving in the 1920s for mill jobs. Heavy industry arrived along the Calumet in the 1870s, drawn by a natural port and the railroads, and the community that grew up beside the mills went by Taylorville, Goosetown and Colehour until the East Side name took hold. In 1874 the Colehour German Lutheran Church became the first of its congregations.

The area today

The East Side lies on the Indiana line, east of the Calumet River, and many of its streets carry letters instead of names, which is why residents call it "alphabet land." Calumet Park holds the lakefront, with a beach, a boat launch and playing fields, and its Classical Revival fieldhouse became a Chicago Landmark in 2006. The Vodak/East Side branch library, at 3710 E. 106th Street, opened that same year. On 114th Street, St. Simeon Mirotočivi Serbian Orthodox Church, built in 1969 by a Serbian immigrant congregation that worked in the mills, is modeled on a 15th-century monastery church in central Serbia. Metra Electric's line to South Chicago ends at 93rd Street, just short of the neighborhood.

Bars and restaurants here

In 2017, the East Side Chamber of Commerce's director called the corner of 106th Street and Ewing Avenue the neighborhood's downtown, and both streets were long-standing commercial corridors. If you run a room on 106th, you share the street with neighborhood taverns, a taqueria and a bar and grill. Ewing Avenue adds a taqueria of its own, a tavern holds a license on Green Bay Avenue, and a not-for-profit club has one elsewhere in the neighborhood. The same director described mom-and-pop businesses whose customers mostly lived nearby, with some also drawn from Hegewisch and South Chicago. At least one establishment here has applied with the state for video gaming licenses.