Slot Machines for Bars in Garfield Ridge, Chicago

History

William B. Archer, a commissioner of the Illinois & Michigan Canal, bought 240 acres near today's Harlem and Archer avenues in 1835, and the avenue carries his name. Few early land buyers stayed, but Dutch market gardeners did, and the Archer Avenue Reformed Church counted 275 parishioners by 1899. Chicago annexed the area in pieces in 1889, 1915 and 1921. Houses first filled the northeast corner, then called Sleepy Hollow, and in the 1920s the population more than doubled as Polish and other Eastern European families arrived. Archer Avenue's streetcar line made it the commercial strip.

Chicago Municipal Airport opened in 1926 and became Midway in 1949, named for the Pacific battle of World War II. It was the world's busiest airport until 1961. Industry, helped along by the airport, brought residents, and by 1950 brick bungalows covered block after block. The population peaked in 1970. When airlines moved to O'Hare, businesses, jobs and residents left; Hispanic and Black families, many from Pilsen and Little Village, have moved in since.

The area today

Garfield Ridge is a neighborhood of single-family houses along the city's western boundary, and Midway Airport is its economic anchor. The name comes from Garfield Boulevard, which is 55th Street, while Archer Avenue remains the long commercial strip. Rapid transit to downtown arrived in the 1990s. Today the Orange Line's Midway station, a ground-level stop on 59th Street with sheltered bike parking that connects to the airport, also meets CTA and Pace bus routes. A park named for Long John Wentworth, the one-time mayor who bought land here in 1853, sits on ground he once owned. Evenings here belong to neighbors heading for a local tavern and to travelers passing through the airport.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on Archer Avenue, you know the mix: corner taverns with their regulars, pizzerias that pour beer, taquerias and seafood kitchens that fill at dinner, and a few member clubs with crowds of their own. Harlem and Narragansett avenues add more neighborhood rooms off the main strip. In 2023 the Midway Chamber of Commerce ran bar crawls through the local taverns, with a party bus between stops, meant to showcase businesses in the Midway area.