Slot Machines for Bars in Gage Park, Chicago

History

German farmers settled this prairie in the 1840s. It was incorporated into the town of Lake in 1865, and when Chicago annexed it in 1889 the whole area held about thirty wood frame cottages and no paved streets. The neighborhood took its name from the Gage family, who owned much of the land. The park at Western Avenue and Garfield Boulevard, begun in 1874 at the turning point of the South Park Commission's boulevard system, was named for commissioner George W. Gage after he died in office in 1875. The electric trolley reached Western and Kedzie between 1900 and 1910 and helped set off a building boom. Many Roman Catholics came from Bridgeport and Back of the Yards, and by 1920 the community was mostly Bohemian and Polish and mostly employed at the Union Stock Yard. St. Gall parish, founded in 1899, dedicated its present church at 55th and Kedzie in 1958. Ben F. Bohac organized Talman Home Federal at 51st and Talman in 1922, and the Colony Theater was built on Kedzie in 1925. By 2000 the community was 79 percent Hispanic.

The area today

Gage Park is a largely Hispanic neighborhood now. Pilsen and Little Village long served as the main entry points for Mexican immigrants, but in 2016 the Chicago Reporter found newcomers increasingly settling here, and a resident who grew up here describes family and friends from Mexico following one another to the same blocks. The park at 55th and Western is the anchor: twenty-five acres with a classical fieldhouse, two gymnasiums, five ball diamonds and a turf soccer field that had its ribbon cutting in 2024. St. Gall's quarter-circle church interrupts the street grid at 55th and Kedzie, and the parish has offered Spanish-language Mass since 1996. The Orange Line's Western station sits at the northern edge at 49th, with Midway two miles away, and the #55 Garfield and #52 Kedzie buses run along 55th Street and Kedzie.

Bars and restaurants here

If you hold a liquor license in Gage Park, you most likely run a kitchen, not a bar: the beer here mostly pours beside a plate of gorditas or tacos, and the taverns proper are a short list. Kedzie between 51st and 55th has a tavern and a gorditas kitchen among the storefronts, and 55th Street beside St. Gall has a tavern of its own. West of Western, 51st Street has a room licensed for entertainment as well as drink among its restaurants, and California at 51st and Western at 52nd each have a corner spot. 59th Street, the area's southern edge, is a run of taquerias and family restaurants where the drink is incidental to dinner. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming.