Video Gaming in Chicago's 25th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

German and Irish immigrants settled Pilsen in the 1840s, encouraged by the Southwestern Plank Road, the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the Burlington Railroad. After the 1871 fire, the McCormick Reaper Company, lumber mills and railroad yards defined the neighborhood, and many Bohemians settled along 18th Street. When one of them opened a restaurant called "At the City of Plzen," residents began calling the neighborhood Pilsen. The blocks around Cermak Road and Damen Avenue, known as Heart of Chicago, drew Germans and Irish in the 1860s and 1870s and were largely Polish by the turn of the twentieth century. Germans and Czechs settled South Lawndale after the fire, and Poles followed.

In the 1950s, many of the area's industries closed their plants, International Harvester among them. The Stevenson Expressway, completed in 1964, gave residents ready access to the Loop. Mexican families, many from the Near West Side, resettled in Pilsen, where Mexican migrants became predominant in the 1950s and 1960s. Fiesta del Sol began in 1973, and Benito Juárez High School was created in 1977.

The area today

Ald. Byron Sigcho Lopez represents the 25th Ward from a ward office at 2100 W. Cermak Rd. The alderperson was elected in a 2019 runoff. The ward is mostly Lower West Side, with Pilsen at its center, and takes in parts of Little Village, including 26th Street near Kedzie Avenue. Pink Line stops at 18th Street and Damen Avenue serve Pilsen, long a point of entry for working-class immigrants, where Mexican artists decorated the neighborhood with murals and mosaics. Plaza Tenochtitlán sits at 18th and Loomis, and the National Museum of Mexican Art stands on 19th Street.

Bars and restaurants here

For an owner in Pilsen, the room to know is 18th Street, the retail strip that runs roughly from Halsted Street to Damen Avenue. Restaurants and bodegas line it, and taverns, music venues, bookstores and carnitas kitchens share the blocks, and the alderperson has called the strip La Dieciocho. Neighborhood events mark the year: Fiesta del Sol on the first weekend in August, parades on September 16 for Mexican Independence Day, and posadas at Christmas. In the western section, 26th Street near Kedzie is known as Calle Mexico, with restaurants, shops and banks serving the neighborhood.