Video Gaming in Chicago's 12th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Irish workers on the Illinois & Michigan Canal took squatters' rights to small tracts near today's McKinley Park around 1836, and the canal and Archer Avenue drew early settlers to Brighton Park. A small settlement called Brighton Park stood near the plank road that is now Western Avenue by 1851, and the Brighton Race Track opened in 1855 on land that later became McKinley Park. The Union Stock Yard, finished in 1865, forced Brighton's own livestock yards to close, but railroads and factories filled the gap: the Santa Fe built its Corwith Yards in 1887, and Brighton Park was annexed to Chicago in 1889. Parishes carried the ethnic character, from Irish St. Agnes in 1878 to Polish Five Holy Martyrs in 1908 and Lithuanian Immaculate Conception in 1914. The Central Manufacturing District opened in 1905, three years after McKinley Park was dedicated on the old racetrack and gave its name to the neighborhood around it. Crane's closing in 1977 weakened the local economy, and by 2000 residents of Mexican origin made up 69 percent of Brighton Park.

The area today

Ald. Julia M. Ramirez represents the 12th Ward from a ward office at 3868 S. Archer Ave. Ramirez, then a community organizer and longtime Brighton Park resident, won the seat in a first run for public office, unseating Ald. Anabel Abarca, who had been appointed to it, with 56.5 percent of the vote in unofficial results. The ward takes in, roughly, Brighton Park and McKinley Park on the Southwest Side, plus parts of New City and the Lower West Side. Archer Avenue runs through it on the diagonal, and the Orange Line's 35th/Archer stop sits on that avenue, across the street from a marker for Marquette and Joliet. McKinley Park, with its swimming pool, ball fields and seasonal ice rink, hosts Movies in the Park and Halloween events through the year.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Archer Avenue, you are on the main commercial street. The McKinley Park Neighborhood Plan calls Archer's run through that neighborhood its densest concentration of shops and restaurants, and reports 27,000 vehicles a day in a March 2018 count. A 2022 Tribune column on one stretch of the avenue said most of the restaurants there are taquerias. The other strip is 35th Street, which the plan describes as designed for pedestrian-oriented commercial development and flags for vacancy and turnover.