Slot Machines for Bars in Lincoln Park, Chicago

History

The southeast corner of today's Lincoln Park began as Chicago's cemetery, set aside in 1837. The graves were a health hazard, and the ground was renamed for the assassinated president in 1865. The Lincoln Park Commission, created in 1869, exhumed the bodies and pushed the park north to Diversey and out into the lake on landfill.

The first Europeans were German truck farmers whose fields earned it the nickname "Cabbage Patch"; St. Michael's Church took its name from the patron saint of brewer and land donor Michael Diversey. Furniture factories and the Deering Harvester Works lined the North Branch, and Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Slovak workers settled the west side. The Great Fire of 1871 leveled most of it; residents rebuilt fast. St. Vincent's College opened near the McCormick Theological Seminary in 1898 and became DePaul University in 1907.

After the Depression hollowed out its housing, the Lincoln Park Conservation Association organized in 1954 to rehabilitate rather than clear; the city named a conservation area in 1956, and a renewal plan in the 1960s displaced poorer Puerto Rican and Black residents. In 1973 the seminary sold its land to DePaul. Those rehabs are today's streetscape.

The area today

Lincoln Park sits three miles north of the Loop with the park as its front yard: the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Conservatory (built in phases between 1890 and 1895), the Chicago History Museum and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum sit steps off Clark Street, and North Avenue Beach fills up on summer weekends. DePaul's Lincoln Park campus, which the university still calls "the little school under the El," covers 40 acres around the Fullerton stop, where the Red, Brown and Purple lines meet; the Brown Line also stops at Armitage and Diversey. Steppenwolf has been at 1650 N. Halsted since 1991. Along the river, the Clybourn corridor is the buffer between the houses and the industrial land on the North Branch, now a shopping district reached from the North/Clybourn Red Line stop. After dark the traffic moves to Lincoln Avenue, Halsted and Clark.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Lincoln Avenue, you know the mix: DePaul students from the campus just west of Lincoln and Halsted, neighbors in for a drink, and the music and theater crowd before and after a show. Halsted has a long run of late-hour taverns, and the newest wave is restaurants taking over the old late-night rooms. Armitage at Halsted, inside the landmark district, is quieter and more polished, with Victorian storefronts that lean toward dinner and a cocktail rather than a long night. Clark Street changes at Fullerton: young professionals north of it, families and zoo traffic south of it. The blocks around campus on Sheffield and Webster run on the student calendar.