Slot Machines for Bars in South Shore, Chicago

History

South Shore was mostly swampland in the 1850s, when German truck farmer Ferdinand Rohn hauled produce to Chicago along trails on the high ground. Before the name took hold in the 1920s, the area was a string of settlements in southern Hyde Park Township, home to Illinois Central and steel mill workers of British heritage. The Illinois Central built its South Kenwood station in 1881 at what is now 71st and Jeffery. Annexation in 1889 and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in nearby Jackson Park set off land sales and building. In 1905 white Protestants who had left Washington Park laid out Jackson Park Highlands, with large front yards, 50-foot lots, underground utilities and no alleys, and in 1906 they founded the South Shore Country Club, which excluded Black and Jewish members. A 1920s housing boom brought Irish, Swedish, German and Jewish families into high-rises, apartment houses and single-family homes. African American families began arriving in the 1950s, and the area was 95 percent Black by 1980; the Encyclopedia of Chicago ties the decline of those years more to redlining and commercial disinvestment than to the new arrivals. The Park District bought the old country club in 1972 and made it a cultural center. In 1973 federal regulators, pressed by local activists, blocked South Shore Bank's move to the Loop, and those activists became its management.

The area today

South Shore runs from 67th to 79th Street between Stony Island Avenue and the lake. Its anchor is the South Shore Cultural Center at 7059 South Shore Drive: the old country club's stucco Mediterranean Revival clubhouse, gatehouse and stable, a Chicago Landmark since 2004. Jackson Park Highlands keeps Prairie School, Tudor and Colonial Revival houses on Bennett, Constance, Cregier and Euclid. The Metra Electric stops at Bryn Mawr (71st and Jeffery) and South Shore (71st near Yates and South Shore Drive). The J14 and No. 71 buses meet at the Bryn Mawr stop, the No. 71 runs on to the 69th Street Red Line station. The No. 6 Jackson Park Express runs from 79th and South Shore to Wacker and Columbus.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room on 71st Street, you know the strip: a busy commercial corridor where a market and a studio room sit east of the Jeffery corner. South of 71st, 75th Street carries more of the scene, with a club near Stony Island and an event hall with its own restaurant out toward Yates, and Stony Island has a room of its own. The other scene sits on the Cultural Center grounds on South Shore Drive, where a patio restaurant, a beach club and a golf course share one lakeside address.