Video Gaming Terminals in 60602 (Loop, Chicago)

History

The governments of Chicago and Cook County have shared the block between LaSalle and Clark, Randolph and Washington, since 1853, and this was the city's core when fire burned four square miles of it in October 1871. The Reliance Building rose at State and Washington between 1890 and 1895; the City calls it the direct ancestor of the glass-and-steel skyscraper. Marshall Field and Company built its State Street headquarters diagonally across State and Washington in 1892 and kept adding to it through 1914. The Chicago Public Library opened its first permanent home at Randolph and Michigan in October 1897, the month the Loop elevated opened. The current City Hall-County Building followed in 1908 and 1911, the 38-story Pittsfield Building on Washington in 1927, and the Dearborn subway in 1951. In 1963 the Public Building Commission decided to build a new Civic Center and plaza in the Loop; it rose east of the County Building, and in 1967 Picasso gave the plaza its sculpture as a gift to the people of Chicago. Block 37, between the plaza and Field's, sat vacant from 1989 until ground was broken on it.

The area today

60602 is the center of the Loop: the blocks between Randolph and Madison, from Wells Street east across State and Michigan into the north end of Millennium Park. City Hall, the County Building, the Daley Center and Daley Plaza fill the government blocks; Block 37 and the Marshall Field building hold State Street. The Chicago Cultural Center, the old central library, anchors the Michigan Avenue end; behind it, the Pritzker Pavilion and Cloud Gate stand on a former rail yard and parking lot, a park since 2004. Washington/Wabash, opened in 2017, is the Loop el stop for the Brown, Green, Orange, Pink and Purple Express lines; the Blue Line's Washington subway at Dearborn connects through Block 37's pedway to the Red Line. In the third quarter of 2025, weekend foot traffic ran above 2019 levels, and the Loop Alliance's chief executive said people use the district more as a social center than as a business.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Dearborn, Clark or LaSalle, your weekday trade comes down from City Hall, the County Building, the Daley Center and the office floors above you, and that after-work crowd is no longer the whole story. The Dearborn is an urban American tavern at the southeast corner of Dearborn and Randolph. On State Street and around Block 37 the customers are shoppers, hotel guests and tourists walking between the Cultural Center and Millennium Park, a weekend crowd that has come back stronger than the weekday one; along Wabash under the el, rooms serve Jewelers Row and the Washington/Wabash commuters.