Slot Machines for Bars in Loop, Chicago

History

Fort Dearborn went up on the south bank of the Chicago River in 1803 and 1804, across the water from DuSable's trading post. South Water Street was the young city's hub in the 1830s, Lake Street a block south its retail street. Streetcars reached State Street in 1859, and after the Civil War Potter Palmer pulled the stores from Lake to State with a hotel and an emporium. The Fire of 1871 burned the center of the city flat.

Skyscrapers rose in its place in the 1880s, then the ring of elevated tracks completed in 1897, named, by most accounts, for the downtown pulley where the cable car strands turned around. Marshall Field's store on State went up in stages from 1892 to 1914, Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building took the corner of State and Madison, and in 1930 the Art Deco Board of Trade closed off the south end of LaSalle Street. Printing houses filled the long, narrow blocks of South Dearborn near the Dearborn Street station, the Printers Row of today. Traffic in and out peaked in 1948 at nearly a million people a day each way; then the suburbs pulled, and apartments slowly came back.

The area today

The L still circles the district, and its newest stop, Washington/Wabash, opened in 2017 in place of two century-old Wabash stations and carries the Brown, Green, Orange, Pink and Purple Express lines. Michigan Avenue between Randolph and 11th is a one-sided street, a landmark wall facing Grant Park, which Montgomery Ward's lawsuits kept open and which took its name in 1896. Millennium Park, on Randolph at the park's north edge, marked twenty years in 2024. North of Randolph, the Chicago Theatre's State Street sign is, in the City's landmark description, an unofficial emblem of the city, and the 1922 Harris and Selwyn twin theaters stand on Dearborn. LaSalle Street is changing fastest: the City's LaSalle Street Reimagined program, launched in 2022, is turning vacant offices into apartments, the first 117 at 79 W. Monroe began renting in September 2026, and the Thompson Center is being rebuilt as Google offices for 2027.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room sits under the tracks on Wabash or Van Buren, your day is built around five o'clock, when the towers empty toward the trains and people want one quick drink before the ride home. That hour thinned once so many of those workers stayed home; one owner a block from the LaSalle Street station told Block Club that Friday, once his best day, had become his worst. Around State, Randolph and Dearborn the clock runs on curtain time, after-work happy hours giving way to pre-theater dinners. What is new is the crowd that does not leave: residents moving into converted office floors on LaSalle and Monroe, who want a neighborhood bar on a Saturday in a district built around the office week.