Video Gaming in Chicago's 8th Ward — bars, licensing, status

History

Chatham, Avalon Park, Calumet Heights and Burnside all began as swampy ground. Hunters called Chatham's marsh Mud Lake, farmers called it Hogs Swamp, and its first buildings were corncribs the Illinois Central put up along its tracks in 1860. The railroad kept shaping the area: it established a Burnside station in 1862 and by the 1890s was building a roundhouse and repair shops south of 95th Street. Chicago annexed the land with Hyde Park Township in 1889. Developer Samuel Gross created the Calumet Heights subdivision in 1887, and drainage reached Avalon Park in 1900. That community, once nicknamed Pennytown, took its present name in 1910.

Bungalows filled Chatham in the 1920s, and a housing complex built there in 1941 helped make Cottage Grove Avenue a shopping street. In 1950 less than 1 percent of Chatham's residents were African American; by 1960 about 64 percent were. Chatham became a stronghold of the Black middle class, and Seaway National Bank and Johnson Products, maker of Ultra Sheen hair products, were among the Black-owned businesses located there.

The area today

Ald. Michelle A. Harris represents the 8th Ward from a ward office at 8539 S. Cottage Grove Ave. Harris was appointed to the seat in 2006 and won reelection in February 2023 with about 71 percent of the vote. The ward is a long strip of the Southeast Side that takes in parts of Chatham, Avalon Park, Calumet Heights and Burnside, with South Shore at its north end and the northern part of Pullman at its south. Stony Island Avenue runs through Avalon Park and Calumet Heights, where Pill Hill is said to be named for the doctors who own homes on the Stony Island ridge. Avalon Park, the park at 1215 E. 83rd St., has a gymnasium, a pool and a track.

Bars and restaurants here

The commercial crossroads are the ones the Encyclopedia of Chicago names for these neighborhoods: 79th Street and Stony Island in Avalon Park, Stony Island and 87th Street in Calumet Heights, and Cottage Grove Avenue, Chatham's older shopping street. On Stony Island, a City Cast neighborhood guide, updated in 2025, calls a daiquiri bar and grill the latest sit-down restaurant on the strip and says a wing house at 91st Street has been a neighborhood staple since at least the 1990s. The blocks behind each strip are largely residential, with bungalows and other single-family homes.