Slot Machines for Bars in Pilsen, Chicago

History

Czech immigrants crossed the South Branch after the Chicago Fire of 1871 and built a new colony along 18th Street, naming it for Pilsen, the second city of Bohemia. The lumber yards along the river and the Burlington rail yards hired thousands, and the McCormick Reaper Works moved to Blue Island and Western in 1873. St. Procopius parish, founded in 1875, raised a Romanesque church at 18th and Allport and became the mother church of the West Side's Czech parishes. Thalia Hall rose at the same intersection in 1892, a meeting and performance hall whose theater was modeled on the old opera house in Prague.

Mexican families, pushed out by urban renewal near Halsted and Roosevelt, settled here in the 1950s and early 1960s, and by the late 1960s Spanish-language storefronts on 18th Street stood beside the older Eastern European shops. St. Pius V, at 19th and Ashland, became the first parish in the neighborhood to offer Mass in Spanish in 1963. Mario Castillo painted Peace at Halsted and Cullerton in 1968, considered the first Chicano mural in the country, and the murals that followed gave Pilsen the look it carries today.

The area today

Pilsen is a largely Mexican American neighborhood, and 18th Street is its spine, running west from Halsted past painted doors, taquerias that make their own tortillas, and murals that run down to the 16th Street viaducts. The Pink Line's 18th station at 1710 W. 18th, its walls painted by Francisco Mendoza and his students in the 1990s, puts riders in the middle of it. Thalia Hall, restored beginning in 2013, fills its corner at 18th and Allport with a music hall, the Tack Room bar, the basement Punch House and a seafood restaurant facing the street. A block south on 19th, the National Museum of Mexican Art opened in 1987 in Harrison Park's old natatorium and moved to a larger building in 2001; the park is where the Good Friday Via Crucis down 18th Street ends. Galleries fill South Halsted, and Fiesta del Sol takes over Cermak Road every August.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on 18th Street you know the rhythm: taquerias and panaderias carry the day, and the night turns over when a show lets out at Thalia Hall and the crowd spills down the block. The strip holds two Pilsens at once: longtime Mexican kitchens and dive bars with their regulars, and newer cocktail rooms that arrived with the galleries. Toward Halsted, the gallery district brings an art-walk crowd; west toward Ashland and the 18th station, the rooms are more neighborhood than destination. Blue Island Avenue, once the Czech shopping street, runs its own strip south of 18th, and Cermak fills on festival weekends. The room that works here knows both crowds by name.