Slot Machines for Bars in West Ridge, Chicago

History

German and Luxembourger farmers settled the land west of the ridge in the 1830s and 1840s, and a hamlet called Ridgeville grew up where Ridge and Devon meet, with St. Henry's Catholic Church as its center. Through the 1800s this was truck farms, greenhouses and open prairie. The farmers and their Rogers Park neighbors fought over improvement taxes and over whether taverns were legal inside Northwestern University's four-mile dry zone, and West Ridge incorporated as its own village in 1890. Chicago annexed it in 1893, but fewer than 500 people lived here until after 1900. In the park-district fight of 1896 and 1897, Rogers Parkers paraded with cabbages on poles and chanted "Cabbageheads" at the farmers, who won anyway; their Ridge Avenue Park Commission went on to create Indian Boundary Park. Brickyards moved to the clay beds near Kedzie, the North Shore Channel was cut in 1909, and after World War I the bungalows and two-flats went up. Devon Avenue became the business district as the population climbed from about 7,500 in 1920 to almost 40,000 by 1930. Jewish families arrived after World War II; South Asian merchants followed from 1973, when India Sari Palace opened on Devon.

The area today

Residents still call it West Rogers Park or North Town, and it runs from Ridge Boulevard west to the North Shore Channel. No train stops inside it; the 155 Devon bus runs from Kedzie east to the Morse Red Line stop. Devon between Seeley and California is the South Asian strip, with Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, Bangladeshi, Rohingya and Afghan businesses, Independence Day parades in August and Diwali lights in the fall. West of California, the Orthodox Jewish community keeps its synagogues on Touhy and around California and North Shore, inside an eruv that reaches the channel. Indian Boundary Park on Lunt keeps its 1929 Tudor Revival fieldhouse, a Chicago Landmark since 2005, and Warren Park, saved from the Edgewater Golf Club, has a nine-hole course and weekend cricket. The Northtown library moved in 2019 into a building shared with Chicago Housing Authority apartments.

Bars and restaurants here

The dining rooms on Devon run on food, chai and mocktails, and they fill with families and suburban day-trippers who drive in and hunt for parking near the Rockwell garage. The tavern trade sits on the edges of that strip. On Devon east of Western, Cary's Lounge has poured cold beer over its pool tables for more than fifty years. On Touhy, Cali's Corner hosts pool league nights, and My Place, a dive that opened in 1971, was a fixture there until it closed in 2017. On Peterson, Black Sheep fields its own league team. These rooms run on regulars, bartenders who know names, live music on the weekends and a crowd that stays until close.