Video Gaming in Chicago's 34th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Irish immigrants settled in wooden cottages west of the river after 1837, followed by Germans, Czechs and French, and after the fire of 1871 more than 200,000 people took refuge on the Near West Side. Wholesalers and manufacturers set up along its northern edge in the 1870s and 1880s. In the late nineteenth century, Greek immigrants began to gather around Halsted, Harrison and Blue Island Streets, in a district called the Delta. Downtown, retail moved from Lake Street to State Street at the end of the Civil War, and skyscrapers rose in the 1880s. On May 4, 1886, someone threw a bomb at police during a labor rally on Desplaines Street, just north of Randolph, and the City later designated the site a landmark. The ring of elevated tracks around downtown was completed in 1897, Union Station opened in May 1925 after ten years of construction, and the Board of Trade Building, built in 1930, closed the view down LaSalle Street. In the 1960s the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois at Chicago displaced Greektown and forced it a few blocks north.

The area today

Ald. William Conway represents the 34th Ward, and the City lists a City Hall office at 121 N. LaSalle St., Room 200, with no separate ward office address. The ward is new to downtown: in redistricting it moved from the Far South Side into the West Loop and downtown, and Conway won the February 28, 2023 election with 66.2 percent of the vote. It takes in, roughly, parts of the Loop and West Loop, Greektown and the UIC campus area. The Blue Line, which the CTA runs around the clock, stops at Washington, Monroe and Jackson downtown and at UIC-Halsted, and Amtrak and Metra trains arrive at Union Station. Anchors include the Board of Trade at 141 W. Jackson Blvd., UIC, and the National Hellenic Museum at 333 S. Halsted St.

Bars and restaurants here

Greektown's restaurants and bars line Halsted, and the neighborhood's business association describes it as a dining and nightlife district. The association says many of the family-owned restaurants there have been open for decades, and the annual Taste of Greektown festival runs along Halsted from Van Buren to Monroe. Downtown, the ward's blocks around LaSalle Street, Wells Street and Wabash Avenue sit near the Blue Line stops, the elevated Loop and the Board of Trade. Union Station, by its own count, sees more than 300 trains a day.