Slot Machines for Bars in Lincoln Square, Chicago

History

Lincoln Square began as farmland. In 1836 the Swiss immigrant Conrad Sulzer bought land near what is now Montrose and Clark, and truck farmers of German and English descent followed him, hauling celery, pickles and greenhouse flowers down the old Little Fort Road, today's Lincoln Avenue, to market in Chicago. The wagon traffic supported a string of taverns for travelers, which is where the street's tavern habit started. Rosehill Cemetery opened in 1859 and still takes up almost a quarter of the community area.

A railroad flag stop in 1868 produced the Ravenswood subdivision, a commuter suburb whose name long stood for the whole district. Streetcars came in the 1890s, the Ravenswood Elevated in 1907, and the farms filled in with bungalows, two-flats and small apartment buildings. Greek families built St. Demetrios church in 1929, and factories, Abbott Laboratories among them, lined the tracks on Ravenswood Avenue. After World War II the merchants at Lincoln, Lawrence and Western set out to sell "Lincoln Square" as a shopping district, raising a statue of a beardless Lincoln in 1956 and building the 1978 pedestrian mall that rerouted traffic and dressed the street with European-style shops and a lantern from Hamburg.

The area today

Seven miles north of the Loop, the center is the Western Brown Line stop at Lincoln, Lawrence and Western, with a slab of the Berlin Wall inside and a rehabilitation the CTA began in summer 2024. From there Lincoln Avenue, narrowed to one lane each way since the late 1970s, runs south to Montrose past Giddings Plaza and its fountain, the Krause Music Store with Louis Sullivan's last facade, and the Davis Theater, open since 1918. The Old Town School of Folk Music has filled the former Hild Library since 1998 and a second building across the street since 2012; Sulzer Regional Library, which replaced Hild in 1985, is a block south. Welles Park, where Lincoln meets Montrose, opened in 1910; its gazebo hosts the summer concerts, and Abe Saperstein started the future Harlem Globetrotters in its fieldhouse. DANK Haus on Western has anchored German life here since 1967.

Bars and restaurants here

The Lincoln Avenue rooms between Lawrence and Montrose are old storefronts with wood inside, and the German ones set the tone: the Huettenbar poured for 35 years before reopening as the Lincoln Square Taproom with much of its original woodwork, and the Chicago Brauhaus, closed in 2017 after 52 years, was rebuilt with its red bar and chandeliers on the second floor of DANK Haus. The crowd is Brown Line commuters, Old Town School students before and after class, the Davis Theater's evening shows, and the plaza on concert nights, Square Roots weekend and Apple Fest. Goosefoot, which opened on Lawrence Avenue in 2011, announced in 2026 that it was moving to Lincoln just north of Welles Park.