Video Gaming in Chicago's 38th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

In 1851 Cook County bought a remote prairie site, 160 acres bounded by Irving Park Road and Narragansett, Montrose and Oak Park avenues, for a poor farm and an asylum for the insane. After the Civil War, Andrew Dunning bought land nearby for a nursery and a village, but the hospital next door kept settlers away. Around the turn of the century a tavern and wooded land at Narragansett and Irving Park became a picnic grove, and clubs, churches and companies held picnics there once the Irving Park Boulevard street railway arrived. The poor farm moved to Oak Forest after 1910, and two years later the state bought the hospital for one dollar.

Portage Park's name recalls the routes Native Americans and fur traders used to carry canoes between the Des Plaines and Chicago rivers, one of them along present-day Irving Park Road. The area lay in Jefferson Township, which joined Chicago in an 1889 annexation. Neighbors formed the Portage Park District in 1912, and the next year its commissioners condemned 40 acres at Irving Park Road and Central Avenue for a park. The park joined the Chicago Park District in 1934.

The area today

Ald. Nicholas Sposato represents the 38th Ward from a ward office at 3821 N. Harlem Ave. First elected to represent the 36th Ward in 2011, Sposato won the 38th Ward seat in 2015 after redistricting, ran unopposed in 2019 and won a fourth term in February 2023 without a runoff. The ward takes in, roughly, Dunning, parts of Portage Park and a western stretch of the O'Hare community area.

Portage Park, entered through a gateway at Irving Park Road and Central Avenue, has an Olympic-size pool built in 1959. It hosted swimming at that year's Pan American Games and the U.S. Olympic team trials in 1972. Wright College sits near Narragansett and Montrose, and the Park District has managed the Dunning Read Natural Area, prairie and wetland at 4050 N. Oak Park Ave., since 2022. The CTA's No. 80 Irving Park bus follows Irving Park Road.

Bars and restaurants here

Irving Park Road is the strip. Near Austin Avenue it works as a small business district of its own, and a local business holiday walk has run along that corridor in recent years. Farther west, Narragansett and Irving Park is the corner where a tavern and picnic grove stood around the turn of the century. The blocks around these corridors hold the apartment buildings and shopping centers that Dunning added in the 1980s, plus Portage Park's ballfields and pools.