Video Gaming in Chicago's 28th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Garfield Park began as Central Park, laid out by William Le Baron Jenney in 1870 and renamed for the assassinated President Garfield in 1881. In 1873 the North Western Railway built its shops north of Kinzie Street, and railroad workers and their families, mostly Scandinavian and Irish, built a village to the south. The Lake Street Elevated arrived in 1893, and after 1914 merchants advertised Madison Street as the Madison-Crawford district, with department stores, movie palaces and hotels. The Garfield Park Conservatory was completed in 1907. The Congress Expressway displaced residents in the 1950s, and after rioting along Madison Street in 1968, businesses left and burned buildings were not replaced.

On the Near West Side, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in 1889 in a district of Irish, German, Czech, Italian, Jewish and Greek immigrants, and the Maxwell Street Market came to life at Halsted and Maxwell. Construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago later demolished most of the Hull House complex and the historic Italian neighborhood. Austin, to the west, began in 1865 as a temperance settlement and joined Chicago in 1899.

The area today

Ald. Jason Ervin represents the 28th Ward from a ward office at 2622 W. Jackson Blvd., 2nd Floor. The ward office's site says Ervin was appointed to the seat in January 2011 and elected to a full term that February. The ward takes in, roughly, East and West Garfield Park, parts of the Near West Side around Little Italy and the UIC area, and a slice of Austin. Green Line stations at Cicero, Pulaski and Conservatory-Central Park Drive serve the Lake Street side. Garfield Park covers 173 acres, with the conservatory next door, and its fieldhouse ballroom is popular for wedding receptions. Ervin sponsored an ordinance to bar video slot and poker machines from the ward; the City Council's License and Consumer Protection Committee voted it down on March 12, 2026.

Bars and restaurants here

Madison Street is a commercial corridor that runs through the ward roughly from Kedzie Avenue to Laramie Avenue. For much of the 1900s it was a thriving commercial street once lined with hotels, theaters and department stores, and the City's Department of Planning and Development has a corridor study covering Madison from Hoyne to Kenton avenues. A community plaza and roller rink are at Madison and Pulaski. A Garfield Park quality-of-life plan names Madison and Pulaski as commercial corridors, and its organizers hope for walkable blocks with businesses and restaurants there. Ervin has said development on Madison is starting to reach the Jackson and Lake Street corridors.