Slot Machines for Bars in West Pullman, Chicago

History

West Pullman Park began as the project of a park district the neighborhood formed for itself in 1913. That district bought the land in 1914 and 1915, had a brick fieldhouse, one story tall, standing by 1915, and soon added playgrounds, tennis courts and ball diamonds. The Chicago Park District absorbed it in 1934.

The park district served a neighborhood that began as an industrial subdivision. The West Pullman Land Association opened it in 1891 as a mix of housing and factory sites, and it recruited the factories itself. The Board of Education's first in-house architect designed West Pullman Elementary School on Parnell Avenue in 1894, and additions followed in 1900 and 1923. University of Chicago sociologists later merged several older communities, this one among them, into a single community area in the 1920s. International Harvester, Dutch Boy, Ingersoll Products and Carl Buddig Meats kept the corridor employing people for much of the twentieth century. By 1998, when the City designated a 210-acre tax increment district there, the industrial park was largely vacant.

The area today

West Pullman is a community area 14 miles south of the Loop. West Pullman Park, at 401 W. 123rd Street, covers more than 16 acres, with two gyms, ball fields, courts and a wooded slope of old oaks, hickories and cherry trees. The Major Taylor Trail, named for the racing cyclist, follows a former rail line for more than six miles, from 81st Street to 134th Street, and passes through here on its way between the Dan Ryan Woods and Whistler Woods. It dates to the late 1990s. Metra Electric stops at 120th Street and Halsted, where CTA and Pace buses connect. On Parnell Avenue, the Romanesque Revival West Pullman Elementary School, a Chicago Landmark, closed as a school in 2013.

Bars and restaurants here

Licensed rooms in West Pullman are few and sit blocks apart. Tavern licenses make up most of them, strung along South Halsted from 120th Street south into the 120s, with one more on 119th Street. Loomis Avenue holds a venue with a Public Place of Amusement license and incidental on-premises consumption, a different business from a neighborhood tavern. Some establishments here have applied with the state for video gaming licenses.