Video Gaming in Chicago's 24th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Lawndale started as a real-estate venture. After Chicago annexed the eastern part of Cicero Township in 1869, the firm Millard & Decker built a residential suburb and advertised it as Lawndale, and its fireproof brick buildings drew people and businesses burned out by the Fire of 1871. Ogden Avenue was earlier known as the Southwest Plank Road, a toll road. Douglas Park was named in 1869 for Senator Stephen A. Douglas; in 2020 it was renamed Douglass Park for Anna and Frederick Douglass. Sears, Roebuck opened its headquarters in the neighborhood in 1906, and in the 1910s Russian Jews became the largest group in North Lawndale, building institutions that included Mt. Sinai Hospital and a commercial strip on Roosevelt Road. African Americans began moving in during the early 1950s, and by 1960 Black residents were 91 percent of the neighborhood. In 1966 Martin Luther King, Jr. picked North Lawndale as the base for the northern civil rights movement. Most of the large plants and small businesses left after 1968, and Sears moved its headquarters to a new downtown tower in 1974.

The area today

Ald. Monique Scott represents the 24th Ward from a ward office at 1158 S. Keeler Ave. Raised in North Lawndale, Scott was named to the seat by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in June 2022, and the City Council confirmed the appointment that month. The ward is mostly North Lawndale, with a slice of Little Village to the south and parts of Garfield Park and Austin along its northern edge. The Pink Line's Kedzie and Pulaski stops sit in the ward. Douglass Park, 162 acres with a fieldhouse, an outdoor pool and a football stadium, holds a summer concert series with Ravinia and the Junta Hispana festival in July. On Arthington Street, the Sears Sunken Garden, which opened in 1907 for the company's workers, is being restored.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Roosevelt Road, you are on the old commercial strip of the neighborhood's Jewish community, and Block Club Chicago has reported plans to turn vacant buildings there into a brunch restaurant and an ice cream cafe with a patio. Ogden Avenue is the other corridor to know. The City picked its stretch from Kedzie to Pulaski as North Lawndale's priority commercial corridor, and the avenue cuts through Douglass Park, where the summer concert series and the July festival are held.