Video Gaming in Chicago's 13th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Dutch and German farmers lived on this stretch of the Southwest Side by the mid-nineteenth century, and Long John Wentworth, a former mayor, owned 4,700 acres that took in land in Clearing and Garfield Ridge. Clearing took its name from a railway switching yard that A. B. Stickney planned in 1888 as a one-mile circle; the plan failed and was nicknamed Stickney's Folly. Chicago annexed much of Clearing in 1915, when a freight hub there served 18 industries, and the Clearing Industrial District counted more than 90 by 1928. In 1926, school-board land in Clearing and Garfield Ridge was leased to the city for an airport, later renamed Midway. Garfield Ridge, named for Garfield Boulevard (55th Street), filled block after block with brick bungalows, and its population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1950. West Lawn's marshy ground drew settlers more slowly, until Clearing's factories grew and a horse-drawn streetcar line ran along 63rd Street through it; St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish began there as a mission in 1909.

The area today

Ald. Marty Quinn represents the 13th Ward from a ward office at 6500 S. Pulaski Rd. The ward takes in, roughly, Clearing and Garfield Ridge on the Southwest Side, plus parts of West Lawn and a sliver of West Elsdon. Midway Airport sits mostly inside it, and the CTA Orange Line, which began service on October 31, 1993, ends at Midway station, at 59th Street and Kilpatrick Avenue, across the street from the airport. Wentworth Park, 15.81 acres at 5625 S. Mobile Ave. in Garfield Ridge, has ball fields, tennis courts, an indoor pool and an ice rink, and Kennedy High School faces it across 56th Street.

Bars and restaurants here

63rd Street is the corridor to know. It runs through West Lawn and out to Clearing, and the Encyclopedia of Chicago describes Pulaski and 63rd as a local retail center and public space. Closer to Midway, Block Club Chicago's survey of the city's long-standing taverns described a corner bar on 63rd Street, three short blocks from the airport's walls, where off-duty pilots, flight attendants, ramp agents and maintenance workers gather alongside locals and travelers.