Slot Machines for Bars in New City, Chicago

History

University of Chicago sociologists mapped the city's community areas in the 1920s and named the land around the stockyards New City, though it never acted as a single community. The Union Stock Yard opened at Exchange and Halsted on Christmas Day 1865, and Chicago annexed the surrounding land in 1889. Major packers built beside the yards by the mid-1870s, and in the 1920s the yards and allied industries employed over 40,000 workers. Irish and German families settled first, then Polish and other Eastern European workers, and after World War I Mexican American and Black workers followed. Trucking and direct sales from farms undercut the central market. Every major packinghouse had closed by 1962, and the yards shut on August 1, 1971, after handling more than one billion animals. In 1984 the city designated the old factory sites an enterprise zone, and new industry gradually replaced the cattle trade.

The area today

The square mile between Halsted, Ashland, Pershing Road and 47th Street, where the pens stood, is now the Stockyards Industrial Park, a mix of distribution and manufacturing. The yards' limestone entrance gate survives at Exchange and Peoria, with a steer head over its arch traditionally thought to portray a prize bull named for yards founder John B. Sherman. Back of the Yards was home to Slavic enclaves until the 1970s and is now largely Mexican American, and the taquerias, restaurants and shops on 47th Street show it. In 2025 the United Yards development put a coffee shop on the ground floor of the historic Goldblatt's building at 47th and Ashland. The Plant, a former Peer Foods meatpacking building at 1400 W. 46th, houses small food businesses. Davis Square Park, at 4430 S. Marshfield, opened in 1905 and keeps a boxing center in its fieldhouse. The 9 Ashland and 47th Street buses run through the area.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on 47th Street, you know the strip: taquerias and Mexican restaurants, and neighborhood taverns, several with Spanish names, on the same blocks. Newer rooms have joined the strip, including a Mexican restaurant that opened on 47th in 2025 with a bar built around tequila and mezcal. Ashland Avenue and 43rd Street have a few more rooms, and the side streets near Wallace and Paulina hold a few more. A brewery founded by a Back of the Yards native is headquartered in the Plant on 46th Street. Some of the rooms here have filed video gaming applications with the state.