Video Gaming in Chicago's 3rd Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

By the Chicago fire of 1871, Prairie Avenue was the city's most fashionable street, and wealthy families built mansions on Indiana, Calumet and Michigan avenues around it. The wealthiest left in the 1890s, and within a few years Michigan Avenue had become Auto Row, where as many as 116 makes of car were sold. Farther south, Stephen A. Douglas bought 70 acres along the lake in 1852. Black families who came north were confined to a narrow strip south of the Loop. In the 1920s that strip became the Black Metropolis, or Bronzeville, a name the Chicago Bee gave it, centered on 35th and State and on 47th and Grand Boulevard, now King Drive. By day, business ran out of the Overton Hygienic and Chicago Bee buildings; at night, clubs hosted Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. After the 1929 crash, most Black-owned banks and insurance companies went out of business. Postwar urban renewal later cleared blocks for public housing, and since the late 1980s community organizations have worked to revive the old Black Metropolis.

The area today

Ald. Pat Dowell represents the 3rd Ward from a ward office at 5046 S. State St. Dowell won the seat in a 2007 runoff and a fifth term in February 2023, running unopposed. The ward takes in parts of Bronzeville, Douglas and the South Loop, a long, narrow strip that the Green Line runs through, with stops at Cermak-McCormick Place, 35th-Bronzeville-IIT, Indiana, 43rd, 47th, 51st and Garfield. Anchors include the Illinois Institute of Technology on 35th Street, the Motor Row landmark district on Michigan Avenue, and the Chess Records building at 2120 S. Michigan, now home to the Blues Heaven Foundation. Block Club reported in January 2023 that Dowell told the Hyde Park Herald the term would focus on housing and retail along 43rd Street.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Michigan Avenue through the South Loop, your neighbors are brunch restaurants and a sports bar; Block Club reported in September 2026 that the former Hudson Motor Building at 2222 S. Michigan is becoming a hotel with a restaurant and event space. On Wabash Avenue, a martini lounge opened that month in the space of a bar that ran for twenty years. In Bronzeville the tradition is the lounge: Block Club's 2026 reporting describes a bartender who knows each regular's drink, heavy pours, music at the center, and nights set aside for stepper sets. Near King Drive, 47th Street is part of the historic Bronzeville corridor.