Slot Machines for Bars in Edgewater, Chicago

History

Luxembourger farmers grew celery here, Germans and Irish followed, and Swedes settled along Clark Street in what they called Andersonville. John Lewis Cochran, a tobacco salesman from Philadelphia, bought lakefront land in the town of Lake View in the 1880s and named his subdivision Edgewater. He laid sewers, sidewalks and streetlights before the first buyer arrived, put mansions on the lake and smaller houses west, and got the railroad to stop at Bryn Mawr. Lake View was annexed to Chicago in 1889.

The elevated reached Howard Street in 1908, and apartment hotels followed on Winthrop and Kenmore. The Edgewater Beach Hotel went up on the lakeshore in 1916, and St. Ita parish dedicated Henry Schlacks's French Gothic church on Broadway in 1927.

The 1940s housing crisis carved the big apartments into small units; four-plus-ones filled the Winthrop-Kenmore corridor, high-rises replaced many of the Sheridan Road mansions, and the hotel closed in 1967. Residents formed the Edgewater Community Council in 1960 and spent the 1970s pulling away from Uptown, where the 1920s mapmakers had filed them. The library branch opened in 1973, and in 1980 the City made Edgewater Community Area 77.

The area today

Edgewater runs along the lake seven miles north of the Loop, and the Red Line stops at Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Thorndale and Granville. Bryn Mawr between Broadway and Sheridan is the old front door: apartment hotels built between 1897 and 1929, on the National Register since 1995 and proposed in 2026 as a Chicago Landmark district, with the sunset-pink Edgewater Beach Apartments at the end of the view. The Broadway Armory at Thorndale, a 1916 ice rink turned state armory, has been a Park District recreation center since 1985. Summer runs on Kathy Osterman Beach, the old Hollywood Beach at the north tip of Lincoln Park, and Berger Park's lakefront mansion on Sheridan. Loyola's Lake Shore Campus straddles Edgewater and Rogers Park, and its students show up on upper Broadway. Andersonville's stretch of Clark Street is where merchants revived the Swedish past in the 1960s.

Bars and restaurants here

Broadway between Thorndale and Granville is tavern country: a bar that doubles as a liquor store by the Granville stop, a Sox bar under the same name since 1977, a burger pub whose tree-covered patio fills with college students, and tavern-food patios between them. Clark at Granville has a family diner open since 1960; Andersonville's blocks of Clark are their own scene. Bryn Mawr from the station to Sheridan is ground-floor rooms under the old apartment hotels, and Sheridan Road is towers with a summer-only cafe steps from the water.