Slot Machines for Bars in Uptown, Chicago

History

Uptown was farmland in Lake View Township when Graceland Cemetery opened, and its first trade was roadhouse taverns on Clark Street serving funeral parties and travelers leaving the city. Chicago annexed it in 1889, and the Northwestern Elevated reached Wilson Avenue in 1900. Lawrence and Evanston Avenue, renamed Broadway, grew into a shopping and entertainment district built to compete with the Loop. Loren Miller, who opened his department store on Broadway in 1915, claimed credit for the name Uptown, and merchants billed it the shopping center for a million people. Essanay Studios on Argyle Street made silent films, Charlie Chaplin's among them, until the company collapsed in 1917. The Uptown Theatre opened in 1925 on the old garden of the Green Mill, second in size only to Radio City Music Hall, and the Aragon Ballroom followed in 1926.

The Depression ended the run, and Lake Shore Drive's extension to Foster in 1933 let shoppers drive past. Wartime landlords cut the big Winthrop and Kenmore apartments into small units, and the cheap rooms drew Appalachian migrants, Japanese Americans and Native Americans in the 1950s, then Southeast Asian refugees after the Vietnam War. The northern half left as Edgewater in 1980, and the Uptown Theatre went dark in 1981.

The area today

The Red Line stops at Wilson, Lawrence and Argyle, six miles north of the Loop. Wilson's stationhouse, rebuilt in 2017 over the 1923 Gerber Building, is a Purple Line stop too; Lawrence and Argyle reopened in July 2025 after a rebuild begun in 2021. Lawrence and Broadway is still the entertainment corner. The Aragon and the Riviera book touring acts, the Green Mill plays jazz in a room that began as Pop Morse's roadhouse, and the Uptown Theatre has been closed since 1981. Argyle Street east of Broadway is the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao business strip, rebuilt in 2016 as the city's first curbless shared street. Saint Mary of the Lake, dedicated in 1917, anchors Sheridan Road, Truman College opened in 1976, and Montrose Beach, built on New Deal landfill, has a lake-steamer beach house, a dog beach and a bird sanctuary just south.

Bars and restaurants here

Lawrence and Broadway runs on the show calendar: rooms fill before doors at the Aragon and the Riviera and again when the crowd lets out, so closing time matters. Uptown Lounge has poured for that crowd until 4 a.m. since 2002, and the corner went four years without its Lawrence stop until the station reopened in July 2025. Argyle Street is a different trade: Vietnamese restaurants and grocers on a curbless block that fills on summer Thursdays, when the night market draws up to 5,000 people between Kenmore and Sheridan. Wilson Avenue has a few late-hour taverns by the stop. On Sheridan Road, Holiday Club held the corner at Irving Park for 25 years and announced in 2026 that it would close to make way for apartments.