Slot Machines for Bars in Irving Park, Chicago

History

Charles T. Race bought farmland here in 1869 from Major Noble. Race meant to be a gentleman farmer, but the Chicago & North Western tracks ran so close that he paid for a depot, the railroad agreed to stop, and he laid out a commuter suburb instead, named Irvington for Washington Irving and soon shortened to Irving Park. His Irving Park Land Company advertised hourly trains downtown and big houses with artesian well water, and the Grayland, Montrose and Mayfair subdivisions followed. The Irving Park Woman's Club formed in 1888, and its literary society grew into the neighborhood library. Chicago annexed the suburb with the rest of Jefferson Township in 1889. A boom from 1895 to 1914 added more than 5,000 buildings, among them the Prairie and Craftsman bungalows of the Villa, a Chicago Landmark district since 1983. Germans and Swedes arrived around the turn of the century, Poles and Russians in the 1920s, and the population peaked in 1930. The Kennedy Expressway came through in 1960 and took houses with it.

The area today

The Kennedy runs through Irving Park, seven miles northwest of the Loop. The Blue Line's Irving Park stop at 4131 W. Irving Park Road connects to Metra's Union Pacific Northwest trains, which still stop where Race's depot stood. Old Irving Park keeps its Queen Anne and Italianate houses, the Villa its landscaped parkways on Avers, Hamlin, Harding and Springfield. Independence Park on Springfield, named for the neighborhood's annual Independence Day celebration, has had its fieldhouse since 1914; Kilbourn Park runs the Park District's only teaching greenhouse; Horner Park's fields on the river at Montrose sit on old brickyard clay pits. St. Viator parish, founded by the Viatorians in 1888, has stood at 4170 W. Addison since 1910, and Schurz High School, Dwight Perkins' 1910 landmark, holds Milwaukee at Addison. The Independence Library got its first permanent home at 4022 N. Elston in 2019. After dark the traffic is on Irving Park Road, Pulaski, Elston and Montrose.

Bars and restaurants here

Irving Park Road is the spine, and its rooms are neighborhood taverns first, where the turnover tells the story. The Independence Tap at 3932 W., a live-music bar from 1970 under tin ceilings with apartments upstairs, changed hands when its owner retired and reopened as a board-game cafe pouring rum cocktails. The Leader Bar at 3000 W., a longtime watering hole, came back in 2025 as a taproom with tavern-style pizza, with a Latin Caribbean patio down the block. Old Irving Park drinks craft, beer and cider inside the old Masonic temple at 4240 W. Irving Park.