Video Gaming in Chicago's 33rd Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Albany Park began as farmland. In 1868 Richard Rusk turned a 10-acre purchase into a large farm with a brickyard on the North Branch of the Chicago River. In 1893 investors bought 640 acres and named the development for Albany, New York, the hometown of one of them. The Ravenswood Elevated reached Kimball and Lawrence avenues by 1907, and builders put up bungalows and two-flats through the 1910s and 1920s. Russian Jews arrived after 1912, and many Jewish families moved on to Lincolnwood and Skokie after World War II. In the 1970s, 70 percent of the commercial property along Lawrence Avenue stood vacant. In 1978 the city, the North River Commission and the Lawrence Avenue Development Corporation began a renewal effort. By 1990 the area had Chicago's largest numbers of Korean, Filipino and Guatemalan immigrants.

Irving Park's development began with Major Noble's farm, which four New Yorkers bought in 1869 to build a suburb seven miles from the city. Subdivisions east of Pulaski Road opened in the late 1890s. Chicago annexed Irving Park and Albany Park in 1889, along with the rest of Jefferson Township.

The area today

Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez represents the 33rd Ward from a ward office at 4747 N. Sawyer Ave. The alderperson won the 2019 runoff by 13 votes. On March 12, 2026, the City Council's License and Consumer Protection Committee voted to reject ordinances that would have banned video slot and poker machines in the 33rd and five other wards, WTTW News reported.

The ward takes in parts of Albany Park and Irving Park, plus a corner of Avondale. The Brown Line ends at Kimball and Lawrence, the terminal the Northwestern Elevated picked for its Ravenswood branch. Roosevelt High School, on Wilson Avenue, is among the public schools the ward office lists in the ward.

Bars and restaurants here

Lawrence Avenue is the corridor. Its commercial district grew up around the Brown Line terminal at Kimball, where small shops, department stores and theaters opened after the line arrived. After the vacancies of the 1970s, the Korean community played important commercial and civic roles in the revival, and the Chicago Public Library's Albany Park branch still describes Korean American residents and businesses concentrated along Lawrence. Around them is a large Latino population, mostly from Mexico and Guatemala.