Slot Machines for Bars in Washington Park, Chicago

History

Sheep once grazed the meadow at the center of Washington Park. The park began as the western division of South Park, an Olmsted and Vaux design, on land the South Park commissioners gathered between 1868 and 1885, and they named it for George Washington in 1881. After the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the building holding the designers' blueprints, the commission hired Horace Cleveland in 1872 to carry out a scaled-back version. A pair of competition-size pools followed in the 1930s, near the refectory Daniel Burnham designed.

The streets around the park grew with the transit lines. Railroad workers bought frame houses here in the 1870s, and St. Anne Church was dedicated at Garfield Boulevard and Wentworth in 1880. Cable cars reached 63rd Street on State Street by 1887, and the "L" ran past 55th Street by 1892. The Sans Souci Amusement Park opened in 1899 at Cottage Grove and 60th Street with vaudeville and band concerts, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens rose on its grounds in 1914 and stood until 1929.

The area today

The park is still the anchor. It has a lagoon, an aquatic center and ball fields, and Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time, made in 1922, stands at its southeastern edge. The DuSable Museum of African American History occupies the administration building Burnham's firm designed in 1910. The Green Line's Garfield station, at 320 E. Garfield Boulevard, has an 1892 station house that became a City landmark in 2001 and was rehabilitated in a project the CTA finished in 2019, which added work by the artist Nick Cave; the No. 55 bus connects there. The Bud Billiken Parade of August 1930 ended in the park, and so did the 97th annual parade in August 2026, when the Hyde Park Herald put the crowd along King Drive at half a million.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room in Washington Park, you work without a tavern row. Licensed rooms are few. Garfield Boulevard, the street also numbered 55th, holds a tavern, a room with a patio licensed for entertainment, and an incidental-consumption license. State Street carries a caterer's license and a foundation's license. At least one establishment here has applied with the state for video gaming licenses.