Video Gaming in Chicago's 20th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Englewood began in 1852, when several railroad lines crossed at a spot called Junction Grove, and its first settlers were German and Irish workers on truck farms, the railroads and, later, the Union Stock Yard. The yard opened on December 25, 1865, outside the city limits. Back of the Yards grew up to its west and south, settled by Irish and German butchers and then by Czech, Polish, Lithuanian and Slovak families who organized their community life around ethnic parishes. Chicago annexed the stockyards district in 1889, the same year it took in Woodlawn, where Dutch farmers had settled in the 1850s. Sherman Park, named for stockyard founder John B. Sherman, opened in 1905.

Woodlawn's Washington Park Subdivision held a racetrack from 1884 to 1905. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lee v. Hansberry that an areawide covenant meant to keep nonwhite families out of the subdivision could not be enforced. In the 1950s the Dan Ryan Expressway split Fuller Park and displaced a third of its people, and the stockyards closed in 1971.

The area today

Ald. Jeanette B. Taylor represents the 20th Ward from a ward office at 5401 S. Wentworth Ave., Suite 19E. The ward runs, roughly, through parts of New City, Washington Park, Woodlawn, Englewood and Fuller Park on the South Side. The Red Line stops at 47th, Garfield and 63rd, and the Green Line's Cottage Grove station sits at 63rd Street. In Washington Park, the DuSable Museum, founded in 1961, occupies an administration building designed by the firm of architect Daniel H. Burnham in 1910, and Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time, created in 1922, stands on the park's southeastern edge. Sherman Park, in New City, has a fieldhouse with two gymnasiums, an auditorium and a pool.

Bars and restaurants here

Start with 63rd Street, which runs through the ward past the Dan Ryan and the Cottage Grove Green Line station. In the 1920s its shops drew riders off the el, and the Encyclopedia of Chicago notes that taverns later replaced furriers as the shopping strip failed. Block Club Chicago describes a years-long wave of development in Woodlawn that coincides with the Obama Presidential Center. On the New City side, 47th Street near Ashland is a Back of the Yards business corridor, where the ground floor of the Goldblatt's building has been repurposed for a bakery, a coffeehouse and a small-business collective.