Video Gaming in Chicago's 23rd Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Garfield Ridge's soggy prairie drew speculators from the 1830s to the 1850s, but few stayed; travelers crossed it on Archer Road, the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the Chicago & Alton Railroad. Dutch market gardeners were among the first to settle permanently, and Chicago annexed the area in pieces in 1889, 1915 and 1921. In the 1920s, Polish and other Eastern European immigrants arrived for jobs in the industrial districts of Clearing and Argo. Archer Avenue, with its streetcar line, evolved into the community's main commercial corridor, and the opening of the airport that became Midway set Garfield Ridge's economic infrastructure in place.

To the east, West Elsdon was still rural in 1938, when cows and goats grazed along 55th Street. The neighborhood then grew from 3,255 people in 1940 to 14,215 in 1960, and almost all of the new building was detached single-family brick houses. West Lawn grew from 14,460 people in 1950 to 27,644 in 1970. Younger Mexican families have been drawn to West Lawn since the 1970s, more settled in eastern West Elsdon in the 1990s, and the CTA's Orange Line began service in 1993 with a station at Pulaski, on West Elsdon's northern edge.

The area today

Ald. Silvana Tabares represents the 23rd Ward from a ward office at 5680 S. Archer Ave., Suite 100. Tabares was appointed to the seat in 2018 after five years in the Illinois House, then won election in 2019 and reelection in 2023. The ward runs through parts of Garfield Ridge, West Lawn and West Elsdon on the Southwest Side. The Orange Line's Pulaski station, at 5106 S. Pulaski Rd., is in the ward. Strohacker Park in West Elsdon is named for a Chicago fire battalion chief who died in a 1957 factory explosion, and Normandy Park in Garfield Ridge was created after World War II as the neighborhood boomed.

Bars and restaurants here

In Garfield Ridge, the commercial corridor is Archer Avenue. The Archer Car Show, sponsored by the Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch and the Midway Chamber of Commerce and held in June, filled nine blocks of the avenue in its 11th year, and the Greater Southwest News-Herald reported that it brings foot traffic and sales to local businesses. Residents surveyed for a community plan, Garfield Ridge 2050, named the lack of a true main street as a common complaint, and the plan proposes making Archer that street. To the east, the Encyclopedia of Chicago calls Pulaski Road and 63rd Street West Lawn's local retail center, and the Orange Line brought suburban-style retail development to Pulaski.