Slot Machines for Bars in North Lawndale, Chicago

History

Ogden Avenue came first, a portage trail that became the Southwest Plank Road, a toll road for Cicero Township's Dutch and English farmers. Chicago annexed the eastern township in 1869, and the firm Millard & Decker laid out a suburb named Lawndale, whose brick buildings drew families and businesses burned out by the 1871 fire. The Burlington tracks brought industry: Western Electric opened a plant across the line in Cicero in 1903, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. built its headquarters at Homan and Arthington in 1906. Jewish families from Russia and Eastern Europe became the largest group here in the 1910s and built Mt. Sinai Hospital, the shopping strip on Roosevelt Road and the synagogue a Romanian congregation raised at 3620 W. Douglas Blvd. in 1926. Black families began arriving in the early 1950s; in 1954 Rev. J. M. Stone's congregation bought that synagogue, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, and in 1966 King rented a third-floor apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin as the base for his northern campaign. The riots after his assassination in 1968, International Harvester's closing in 1969 and Sears's move downtown in 1974 emptied the strips.

The area today

North Lawndale is a neighborhood of two-flats hemmed in by rail lines on three sides, the Eisenhower a few blocks past its northern edge. Douglass Park, 162 acres at Sacramento and Ogden, has Jens Jensen's Flower Hall, the names of Anna and Frederick Douglass since 2020, and Riot Fest, its September tenant since 2015. At Homan Square, the Sears tower at 900 S. Homan reopened in 2015 as Nichols Tower, home to the School of the Art Institute and neighborhood organizations, and the Sears Administration Building on Arthington is a Chicago Landmark. Ogden Avenue is the City's priority corridor from Kedzie to Pulaski; Ogden Commons at Washtenaw brought Mt. Sinai's offices, Cinespace's filmmaker incubator and sit-down restaurants to a former CHA site. The Pink Line stops at Central Park and Ogden and at Kedzie; the Blue Line's Kedzie-Homan station sits on the Eisenhower to the north.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room here you know the honest version: the strips are Roosevelt Road, Ogden Avenue and 16th Street, and sit-down rooms are new and few. Sixteenth Street, once lined with small businesses, has struggled for decades; the Soul Food Lounge at 3804 W. 16th, under the MLK Legacy Apartments, drew neighbors and local leaders to its soft launch. On Roosevelt, Soulé built a soul food dining room with a bar near Central Park. At Ogden Commons near Douglass Park, La Catedral, a Little Village breakfast restaurant, announced a second location in 2023. Riot Fest weekend brings a crowd the organizers steer toward local kitchens; the rest of the year, the room that works is the one the block can walk to.