Slot Machines for Bars in Grand Boulevard, Chicago

History

The area was first called the Forrestville Settlement and joined Chicago with Hyde Park in 1889. In 1874 the South Parks Commission lined a thoroughfare with trees in what had been prairie and woods and named it Grand Boulevard, today's King Drive. It became a carriage route, and the wealthy built mansions along it. At 51st Street it led into Washington Park. The South Side "L" added stops at 43rd, 47th and 51st in 1896, and shopping strips grew around each one. Irish Catholics built Corpus Christi at 49th Street, and German Jews built Sinai Temple at 46th, later Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached in 1967. By 1930 African Americans made up 94.6 percent of the community's 87,005 residents. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played the Regal Theater at 47th and South Parkway, and Count Basie and Nat King Cole played the Parkway Ballroom a few blocks north. In 1968 South Parkway, as the boulevard was then known, became King Drive.

The area today

King Drive is still the spine. The Green Line's 47th Street station stands just west of it, and the Harold Washington Cultural Center, a theater with 1,000 seats that opened in 2004, stands at 47th and King. At 46th, Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, long known for its gospel choirs, still holds the old Sinai Temple and became a Chicago Landmark in 2020. The Hall Branch library at 48th and Michigan opened in 1932 and became a meeting place for writers, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks among them. Pershing Road bounds the area on the north, Cottage Grove on the east, and 51st Street on the south, where Washington Park begins. After dark, the cultural center's stage and the rooms along 47th draw the crowd.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on King Drive or 47th Street, you know most rooms here are built around something besides the bar. East of King, a gallery in a former dairy building and a neighborhood bar with a small dance floor sit on the same stretch. A patio tavern sits a block north of 47th, and a caterer's liquor license sits at the Parkway Ballroom building, 4455 S. King Drive. Cottage Grove along the east edge has newer blocks of wine, pizza and board games, and a kitchen holds down Pershing Road to the north.