Slot Machines for Bars in West Loop, Chicago

History

Randolph Street fed Chicago long before it fed anyone dinner. It was a wholesale produce market, and two blocks north on Fulton Market Street stood much of the city's meatpacking industry. Wholesale and manufacturing firms filled three- and four-story buildings across the north of the Near West Side in the 1870s and 1880s. On Randolph, the old shops are now open-air restaurants and patios, with terra cotta facades and wide doorways that once took deliveries.

On the evening of May 4, 1886, a protest meeting at the Randolph Street Haymarket drew a crowd onto Des Plaines just north of Randolph. Police marched in to break it up, someone threw a bomb, and eight anarchists were tried for murder; four were hanged in 1887. The trial began the tradition of May Day labor rallies. The City made the site a Chicago Landmark in 1991, and Mary Brogger's sculpture marks where the speakers' wagon stood.

Parts of the Near West Side later drew middle-class Chicagoans who wanted to live near downtown, and old warehouses became homes and offices. Oprah Winfrey taped her show for 25 years at Harpo Studios at Washington and Carpenter; the building came down in 2016 for McDonald's headquarters. The City Council made the Fulton-Randolph Market District a Chicago Landmark in 2015.

The area today

The Green and Pink Lines run over Lake Street. The Morgan stop opened in 2012 as the first new CTA station in Chicago in 18 years, and the CTA's president said it would benefit longstanding businesses and newer restaurants, nightclubs and shops. Clinton, at 540 W. Lake, connects to Metra's Ogilvie station, and Union Station on Canal, finished in 1925, is the last of Chicago's great rail terminals still in use. Mary Bartelme Park on Sangamon, named in 2010 for Illinois's first woman judge, has misting steel gates, a sunken dog park and terra cotta from the old building set into its seat walls. In June the Taste of Randolph takes over blocks of Randolph for three days of live music and restaurants, and the Randolph Street Market brings antiques and vintage dealers to 1341 W. Randolph on market weekends. McDonald's, Google and Uber keep offices here.

Bars and restaurants here

Randolph has long been known as Restaurant Row for its independent restaurants, and Halsted runs south to Greektown's restaurants. A West Loop restaurateur told Block Club that Fulton Market is busiest on weekend nights and comparatively quiet during the week. Block Club reports that retail rents there have more than doubled in a decade, with national chains taking corners chef-driven restaurants once held. Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) has raised concerns about crowds spilling onto surrounding blocks when bars reach capacity or close for the night. In September 2026 he said he would propose banning metered parking after 11 p.m. on streets like Fulton, Lake and Randolph, and letting the City act faster against businesses that violate their plans of operation.