Slot Machines for Bars in Lower West Side, Chicago

History

The Lower West Side is Community Area 31, hemmed in by the Chicago River on the south and east and the Burlington Northern tracks on the north and west. It was a factory district: the Schoenhofen brewery at 18th and Canalport, lumber yards along the river and the McCormick Reaper Works. West of Damen, the blocks around Cermak Road became Heart of Chicago, settled by Germans and Irish in the 1860s and 1870s and largely Polish by the turn of the century. German Catholic men gave their labor to raise St. Paul's at 22nd Place and Hoyne, the church known as "built without a nail." In 1903 Italians from Tuscany raised St. Michael Church on 24th Place near Oakley on the foundation of a former Swedish Methodist church. The same year the Fisk generating station went up near what became Dvorak Park; it burned coal until August 2012. When Mayor Anton Cermak died in 1933, the City Council renamed 22nd Street Cermak Road for him. The plants began closing in the 1950s, International Harvester among them. The Stevenson Expressway, finished in 1964, gave the area quick access to the Loop, and Mexican families who prospered bought homes in Heart of Chicago, as Poles had before them.

The area today

The Pink Line crosses the area with stops at 18th, Damen (2010 S. Damen) and Western (2009 S. Western). Dvorak Park at 1119 W. Cullerton, begun in 1907 as one of the West Park Commission's first three neighborhood parks and named for the Czech composer, sits near the old Fisk site. Harrison Park at 1824 S. Wood, built on an old lime-kiln site, got a new fieldhouse in 1993 and has an indoor pool, a boxing gym and ballfields. At 18th and Halsted, John Podmajersky turned old garment-finishing shops into the Pilsen East Artists Colony in the 1960s. Cermak Road, once 22nd Street, crosses the whole area.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Oakley or Western near 24th, you are on what remains of Heart of Chicago's Italian strip, where dining rooms that once fed International Harvester shifts now draw diners from the North Side and suburbs. The strip once held dozens of Italian restaurants and now holds a handful, Il Vicinato on Western and its front-room bar among them, and Oakley Fest Pasta Vino has filled the street for more than two decades.