Slot Machines for Bars in Gold Coast, Chicago

History

The Encyclopedia of Chicago dates the Palmers' house at 1350 N. Lake Shore Drive to 1882 and shows the Drive in the mid-1880s as a relatively quiet boulevard for carriage rides. Property owners near the lake asked the park commissioners to extend the Drive south from Oak Street to Ohio Street, agreeing to give up their riparian rights and help pay for the landfill, and the work was built in the 1890s. The project included a small sand beach at the foot of Oak Street, the Chicago Park District says. By the early 1910s, owners of mansions near the beach complained about the crowds of bathers, and in 1917 the commissioners limited the hours the public could use it.

Because the area was isolated from downtown, only a few wealthy families, among them the McCormicks, Palmers and Ryersons, lived here before the Michigan Avenue Bridge was built in 1920. A new form, the luxury apartment building, sprang up, and some of the elite moved into residential hotels such as the Drake. Sociologist Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, who claimed college boys back from the East Coast coined the name, published The Gold Coast and the Slum in 1929.

The area today

The 1200 through 1600 blocks of Astor Street and their cross streets form a Chicago Landmark district, designated in December 1975, with buildings dating from 1880 to 1940. One of them, the 1891 Charnley House at 1365 N. Astor St., was built for a lumber dealer and is credited to Adler & Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mariano Park, at 1031 N. State St., covers 0.18 acres and has a Prairie-style pavilion designed in 1900 by Birch Burdette Long. The Park District calls it a people-watching spot. Oak Street Beach, at 1000 N. Lake Shore Drive, has a cafe and hosts amateur and professional volleyball tournaments through the summer. The Park District says the Clark/Division Red Line station and the 22, 36 and 151 buses serve the beach.

Bars and restaurants here

Block Club describes Division Street in the Gold Coast as a lively strip, and wrote in October 2025 that a bar that opened in 1961 became one of its main attractions. On Rush Street, it reported in January 2026 that an Italian restaurant that opened in the Gold Coast in 1994 had reopened at 1037 N. Rush St., now upstairs, after a two-year renovation. In June 2026 it reported that a rooftop restaurant would open at 15 E. Oak St., with terraces at Oak and Rush and facing Mariano Park, in what it called one of Chicago's most competitive dining corridors. At Elm and State streets, a bar was opening in a former bank in a 1927 building, Block Club reported in November 2025.