Slot Machines for Bars in West Elsdon, Chicago

History

West Elsdon was a marshy remnant of an ancient lake until the early twentieth century. Among the first settlers were German farmers and Irish railroad workers, and the Grand Trunk Railroad tracks marked the eastern edge from 1880. The neighborhood lies west of Elsdon, the hamlet of railroad workers that grew up around the Grand Trunk car shops near 51st Street and Central Park. Most building stayed east of the tracks until the 1920s, when the population climbed from 855 in 1920 to 2,861 in 1930.

Chicago Municipal Airport, now Midway, opened just to the west in the 1920s, and Polish and Czech families, with smaller numbers of Italian, Yugoslavian and Lithuanian immigrants, moved in. Crawford Avenue, now Pulaski, and 55th Street were paved in that decade, though cows and goats still grazed along 55th in 1938. St. Turibius parish, also founded in 1927, made do with a small frame church until 1952.

From 1940 to 1960 the population rose from 3,255 to a peak of 14,215. Almost all the new building was detached brick houses, which made West Elsdon an extension of the Bungalow Belt.

The area today

West Elsdon is a Southwest Side neighborhood of bungalows near Midway Airport, and Pulaski Road is its main street. In the 1990s, as the older generation aged, new families arrived and Mexican residents settled the eastern blocks. In 1993 the CTA opened the Orange Line's Pulaski station, at 5106 S. Pulaski on the northern edge of the community, and suburban-style retail followed along the avenue. Walk south from the station past the national chains and, near 56th Street, you reach a Mexican restaurant in a whitewashed brick building with an agave bar and a long seafood menu. Fifty-fifth Street, where the Grand Trunk once ran a passenger station, crosses the bungalow blocks west of the tracks.

Bars and restaurants here

If you run a room here, you know the licensed scene is small, and it runs mostly toward dinner. On Pulaski Road south of the Orange Line, sit-down restaurants do the work: national chains near the station, then Mexican restaurants, some built around seafood, where a drink is part of the meal rather than the reason to come. Over on 55th Street, the taverns serve the bungalow blocks around them. West Elsdon is not a nightlife district, and a room here is a neighborhood room: it lives on its own block, its neighbors and whoever turns off Pulaski to find it.