Slot Machines for Bars in Humboldt Park, Chicago

History

Humboldt Park began as a sparsely settled prairie tract on the Northwest Side. The park was named for the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in 1869, and Chicago annexed the area the same year. A street railway arrived in 1886, and branches of the Elevated Railway followed in the 1890s. Two-flats became popular between 1900 and 1920, alongside brick bungalows and frame houses.

Danish and Norwegian families moved up the Milwaukee Avenue corridor in the 1880s and 1890s, and in 1901 Scandinavian Americans gathered for the unveiling of a Leif Erikson statue. Poles put up an equestrian statue of Thaddeus Kosciuszko at the park's entrance in 1904. Italian Americans and German and Russian Jews came in the 1920s and 1930s for the newer, larger apartments. Division Street offered sidewalk music and soapbox speeches, and Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel came out of that setting.

Puerto Ricans moved in from West Town and points east during the first large migration of Puerto Ricans to Chicago, between 1950 and 1965. Division Street, known as La División, has anchored that community since the 1960s, and park roads were renamed for Luis Muñoz Marín and Pedro Albizu Campos.

The area today

The park holds a lagoon that Jens Jensen reshaped into a prairie river, his formal rose garden, and a Prairie-style boathouse. The Encyclopedia of Chicago calls Humboldt Park the symbolic nucleus of Puerto Rican Chicago.

Bars and restaurants here

On North Avenue, Block Club's 2026 patio guide lists Humblebar & Lounge at 3018 W. North, a neighborhood bar with a wooden patio and views of Humboldt Park. The park itself sets the tone for the blocks around it, with its Prairie-style boathouse, its rose garden and the lagoon Jens Jensen shaped, and the neighborhood's Puerto Rican community has made the park and La División its gathering places since the 1960s, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.