Video Gaming in Chicago's 7th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

The ward stitches together four communities shaped by the lakefront and the Calumet River. In South Shore, railroad and steel-mill workers of British heritage settled communities named Essex, Bryn Mawr and Cheltenham Beach, and the Illinois Central built its South Kenwood Station at 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard in 1881. Annexation to Chicago in 1889 and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in nearby Jackson Park set off a housing boom.

Steel shaped the rest. A mill opened on the Calumet River in 1875, and South Chicago's South Works followed in 1880 and closed in April 1992. In South Deering, Wisconsin Steel shut without notice in March 1980. Calumet Heights, subdivided in 1887, filled with homes in the 1920s and again after World War II, and its Pill Hill section is said to be named for the doctors who own homes along the Stony Island ridge.

The area today

Ald. Gregory I. Mitchell represents the 7th Ward from a ward office at 2249 E. 95th St. Mitchell defeated incumbent Natashia Holmes in the April 2015 runoff, taking 57 percent of the vote, and was unopposed on the 2023 ballot. The ward takes in parts of South Shore, South Chicago, Calumet Heights and South Deering, running from the South Shore lakefront south past 95th Street. On the lake, Rainbow Beach Park, named for the U.S. Army's 42nd Rainbow Division, sits at 77th Street. The South Shore Cultural Center occupies the former South Shore Country Club, and neighbors rallied to save its clubhouse from demolition after the Park District bought the property in the 1970s.

Bars and restaurants here

Several public places anchor the South Shore side of the ward. The Cultural Center rents its solarium, dining hall and theater for events, with a nine-hole golf course and a beach outside, and Rainbow Beach Park has a fieldhouse, a gym and baseball diamonds on the lake. Inland, 79th Street, which the City has named its priority corridor for South Shore, runs past Exchange Avenue and the Cheltenham Metra station. At 75th Street and Exchange Avenue, a family restaurant that had been a neighborhood staple since 1980 gave way in 2024 to a new café.