Slot Machines for Bars in West Lawn, Chicago

History

Developers James Webb and John F. Eberhart founded West Lawn in 1877 together with Chicago Lawn, and Chicago annexed it in 1889. Early buyers favored the blocks beside the rail station at 63rd and Central Park, while West Lawn itself stayed marshy. A short-lived brickyard left a pond that people used for swimming and skating until it was filled in. A horse-drawn streetcar on 63rd Street tied the area to the factories of Clearing, and the population reached 2,544 by 1920. St. Nicholas of Tolentine began as a mission church in 1909. Streets west of Pulaski were paved in the 1930s, but the Depression kept builders away, and the war years brought them back. A plant at Cicero and 77th built bomber engines, then became an automobile plant, first for Tucker and later for Ford. Single-family brick houses went up, and the population grew from 14,460 in 1950 to 27,644 in 1970. Ford City shopping center opened on the old plant site in 1965.

The area today

Pulaski and 63rd is the local crossroads. The West Lawn branch library opened near it in 1986, and the #63 bus runs 63rd Street to the Midway Orange Line station. West Lawn Park, at 65th and Keeler, took until 1948 to acquire and got its name in 1953; it has a fieldhouse with a gymnasium and fitness center, fields and a playground. Nearby at 65th and Pulaski, the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture moved into a former hospital in 1986, after beginning in a two-flat on Archer Avenue in 1966.

Bars and restaurants here

Along 63rd Street on both sides of Pulaski, seafood kitchens, family restaurants and a banquet hall do the work, with the drink alongside the meal. On Cicero Avenue the licenses are a movie theater, a tavern license at an airport hotel and a bar and grill. Pulaski Road carries the same mix north and south of 63rd: taquerias, a pizzeria with a bar, a lounge licensed for entertainment and, farther south, a tavern. If you run a room here, you know most of the licensed scene is kitchens. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses.