Video Gaming in Chicago's 4th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Dr. John A. Kennicott built a home near the Illinois Central tracks in the 1850s and named it Kenwood, and the railroad gave its depot near 47th Street the same name. Senator Lyman Trumbull, Julius Rosenwald and Gustavus Swift followed, and the L reached the area in 1907. To the north, Charles Cleaver bought swampy lakefront ground near 38th Street in 1851 and built a soap factory and company town; developers renamed the district Oakland in 1871. After Dearborn Street Station was completed in 1885, Printers Row became the printing center of the Midwest. Housing discrimination confined Great Migration newcomers to a narrow "Black Belt," and a Chicago Bee theater editor, James J. Gentry, suggested the name Bronzeville for the community. Burnham Park was created on lakefront landfill in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soldier Field, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium and the Shedd Aquarium were built. Lake Meadows was developed in 1952, the first McCormick Place opened in 1960 and Prairie Shores was built in 1962. In the late 1970s the city designated several segments of Kenwood as historic districts, the same decade developers began converting Printers Row's printing buildings into lofts.

The area today

Ald. Lamont J. Robinson represents the 4th Ward from a ward office at 928 E. 43rd St. Robinson, who succeeded Ald. Sophia King, won the 2023 runoff with 66.5 percent of the vote. The ward takes in parts of the South Loop, Bronzeville, Kenwood and Hyde Park, a long strip that runs south from Printers Row. The Museum Campus, with the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium and Soldier Field, is in the ward, and McCormick Place sits at the campus's southern end. Metra Electric stops at McCormick Place and at 47th Street in Kenwood. Oakland and North Kenwood fill the lakeside blocks between 35th and 47th Streets, mostly east of Cottage Grove Avenue.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Cottage Grove Avenue or the stretches of 43rd and 47th Streets beside it, you are on the priority corridor the City's INVEST South/West program has named for Bronzeville. Bronzeville Summer Nights, an annual open-house series that runs July to September, spotlights a different commercial corridor each month, with Cottage Grove, 43rd Street and 47th Street on the 2026 schedule, and draws neighbors to restaurants, galleries and shops. In Printers Row, Block Club Chicago reported two new bars in December 2025, one a sports bar on Dearborn Street. Near the lakefront, Soldier Field is where the Bears play, and Metra Electric runs extra service for those games.