Slot Machines for Bars in Portage Park, Chicago

History

Irving Park Road follows an old portage. In wet seasons a canoe could be paddled from the Chicago River to the Des Plaines along its line, and the park, then the neighborhood, took its name from it. A tavern opened on the Northwest Plank Road in 1841 and doubled as town hall for Jefferson Township until Chicago annexed the township in 1889. The Milwaukee Avenue streetcar arrived in 1907 and the houses followed. In 1912 neighbors formed their own park district, condemned 40 acres at Irving Park Road and Central Avenue the next year, and opened the park in the summer of 1916 with a sand-bottomed swimming lagoon; Clarence Hatzfeld's prairie-style fieldhouse followed in 1922. The Browarsky brothers opened the Portage Theater on Milwaukee Avenue in 1920, the Sears building at Six Corners dates in part to 1938, and two parishes founded in 1914, St. Pascal on Melvina and the Polish parish of St. Ladislaus near Roscoe and Long, served the new blocks. In 1959 the park's pool was rebuilt to Olympic size for the Pan American Games. The Kennedy Expressway reached the neighborhood by the early 1960s, and residents prevailed against the proposed Crosstown Expressway.

The area today

Portage Park is brick bungalows and two-flats on the side streets, with its business on Milwaukee Avenue, Irving Park Road, Cicero, Central, Belmont and Montrose. Six Corners is still the center. The Sears at Six Corners closed in 2018 and was slated for apartments over storefronts, and the Portage Theater, a Chicago Landmark dark since 2018, made Landmarks Illinois's 2024 list of the state's most endangered places. The park at Irving Park and Central is the neighborhood's living room: two fieldhouses, the Olympic-size pool with a smaller heated pool beside it, a boxing gym, ball fields and tennis courts. The Kennedy Expressway and the Jefferson Park Transit Center just to the northwest, where the Blue Line meets Metra's UP-NW line and a dozen CTA and Pace bus routes, carry the commute. By 1990 the neighborhood was mostly Polish, Italian, Irish and German.

Bars and restaurants here

A pub that opened on Milwaukee Avenue beside the Portage Theater in 2021 is built around a horseshoe bar, dart boards and a wall of screens. Irving Park Road west of Cicero is neighborhood taverns and family restaurants, tradespeople at lunch and couples from the side streets at night. Central Avenue south of Irving Park traded an old lounge for a sports bar with a beer garden in 2017. Montrose and Addison are corner-tavern streets where the regulars are the neighbors and the bartender knows the block.