Slot Machines for Bars in River North, Chicago

History

William B. Ogden found his family's land north of the river swampy, kept buying because factories could sit along the water, and in 1848 brought the city's first railroad in beside it. Irish factory workers settled at the fork of the river, a patch called Kilgubbin. For generations the Near North Side split in two: a rich residential strip by the lake, an industrial, low-income district in the west, and Clark Street as the buffer between them.

The Cook County Criminal Courts building, now Courthouse Place, opened on Hubbard Street in 1893 and heard the Leopold and Loeb and Black Sox cases. Reid, Murdoch & Co. put its wholesale grocery warehouse on the river at Clark Street in 1914. Marshall Field & Co. followed with the Merchandise Mart, the world's largest building when built.

In 1981 art dealers found loft space in the old manufacturing blocks, and within a year sixteen galleries opened within a block of one another. A critic called the district SuHu, for Superior and Huron streets; the River North name came later. A five-alarm fire in April 1989 destroyed nine galleries on the block bounded by Huron, Sedgwick, Orleans and Superior, and the neighborhood changed.

The area today

The Mart still fronts the river, with its own Brown and Purple Line station at 350 N. Wells. The Red Line runs under State Street with stops at Grand and Chicago, and the Brown and Purple Lines stop a second time at Chicago and Franklin. The stepped gables of the 1895 Chicago Varnish Company building still face Kinzie Street, and more than a dozen galleries remain from the SuHu years. What fills the streets after dark is the restaurant and club trade that took over the blocks in the 2000s: three- and four-story rooms on Hubbard Street that stack a sports bar, a club and a rooftop, rooftops eight floors up on LaSalle, and the restaurant row on Clark between Kinzie and Grand, which the City closed to traffic for summer dining through the 2023 season.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Hubbard Street west of State, you already know the hours: doors at five in the evening and open until four in the morning, five on Saturdays, in rooms stacked three and four floors high, sports bar at the sidewalk, club above it, rooftop on top. Clark Street between Kinzie and Grand is the dinner row, patios out front from May into October, where the hotel crowd walks out to eat and keeps walking to the next kitchen. Wells and Illinois keep picking up new rooms, and the blocks up LaSalle and Orleans carry rooftop dining rooms more than clubs.