Slot Machines for Bars in Hyde Park, Chicago

History

Paul Cornell, a young lawyer, bought a 300-acre tract of lakefront between 51st and 55th Streets in 1853 and deeded sixty acres to the Illinois Central Railroad in return for a station. The first Hyde Park station opened at 53rd Street in 1856, and the town grew along the tracks. Chicago annexed the township in 1889, and the World's Columbian Exposition, held in the surrounding parks in 1893, set off a building boom. The Baptist Church, with John D. Rockefeller's support, created a new University of Chicago on land donated by Marshall Field, just north of the Midway Plaisance.

Taverns were confined to small districts, and one sat beside the Illinois Central tracks at 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue, where bars crowded together in the decades before Prohibition. Urban renewal ended that. Demolition began in 1955 between 54th and 57th Streets, and nearly every building on East 55th Street came down. The old art colony on 57th Street was pulled down too, and its artists could not afford the replacement in Harper Court.

The area today

The University of Chicago's campus straddles the Midway Plaisance, the park strip that links Washington Park on the west to Jackson Park on the east. The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House draw visitors, and Promontory Point and the 57th Street beach sit on the lake. Metra Electric has three Hyde Park stops, and the 51st/53rd Street station at Lake Park Avenue lands riders on 53rd Street, the main business strip. The new Harper Court, a retail and office complex with a hotel beside it, opened on 53rd in 2013. Along 55th Street, most of the shops sit inside the Hyde Park Shopping Center. Court Theatre, dinner and live music fill the evenings.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on 53rd Street, you know it is a restaurant street first: pizza counters, Thai kitchens and sit-down places with patios, a few of them licensed for entertainment. Students, faculty and neighbors make up the crowd, and regulars tend to know one another by name, as a Sun-Times writer noticed on 53rd Street. Neighborhood bars sit in among the restaurants. On 55th Street the old tavern strip is gone, and the bars that outlasted urban renewal are the exceptions. The university's own rooms, a theater and a campus club among them, hold licenses too. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses.