Slot Machines for Bars in McKinley Park, Chicago

History

McKinley Park's working-class story began around 1836, when Irish workers on the Illinois and Michigan Canal took squatter's rights to small tracts of land here. The canal was completed in 1848 and the Chicago and Alton Railroad arrived in 1857, and during the Civil War industry settled along the waterways and the tracks. The Union Rolling Mill, founded in the early 1860s on the south fork of the Chicago River, produced 50 tons of rails a day. Many steelworkers lived in the triangle formed by Archer and Ashland Avenues and 35th Street, a swampy, undrained area called Mt. Pleasant where spring flooding was so severe that many houses were built on stilts. Chicago annexed the area in 1863. After the fire of 1871 displaced industry, 11 factories and 27 brickyards opened here within five years, while the meatpacking houses just south dumped their waste into the south fork, which became known as Bubbly Creek. The park, the first developed on the South Side, dates to 1901 and was named for President McKinley after his assassination; it gave the community its name. In 1905 the Central Manufacturing District, the nation's first planned industrial district, was begun along the south fork, and its Pershing Road phase added brick and terra cotta warehouses and the clock tower at 2000 W. Pershing.

The area today

McKinley Park today is a neighborhood of well-kept two- and four-flats four miles southwest of the Loop, where Mexican families joined the longtime ethnic mix in the 1990s. Two Orange Line stops serve it, Ashland and 35th/Archer on Leavitt Street, each with CTA bus connections, and the park is a ten-minute walk from the 35th/Archer platform. The park is still the showpiece, with a pool, an ice rink, ballfields and a lagoon surrounded by native prairie and wetland plantings. Across Pershing Road, the Central Manufacturing District's brick warehouses face it, many vacant for decades. 35th Street holds storefronts from a Latin American bakery to a short block near Archer that NBC Chicago's food segment featured for two restaurants. Along Iron Street on the industrial edge, a brewery sits just across from Bubbly Creek and runs themed weekly events.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room in McKinley Park you already know the scene is small and scattered, with no single strip. Archer Avenue has a tavern and a restaurant with a patio. Around 35th and Damen you find a Legion post and restaurants, and a Nayarit-style seafood place with its own patio sits a block north on 34th. Out on the industrial edge, a cantina sits on Pershing Road and the brewery on Iron Street. Most rooms here are restaurants that pour with a meal, with one tavern among them. At least one establishment here has applied with the state for a video gaming license.