Video Gaming Terminals in 60604 (Loop, Chicago)

History

In the City's boundary file, 60604 runs roughly from Adams Street south to Van Buren and from Wells Street east past Michigan Avenue into Grant Park, which puts the LaSalle Street financial district and the Dearborn Street blocks of early skyscrapers in one postal code. After the Fire of 1871 destroyed the central city, a temporary City Hall and water tank stood at LaSalle and Adams; pigeons roosted there, and the Rookery that Burnham & Root built on the site in 1885-88 kept the name. The north half of the Monadnock on Jackson, finished in 1891 on load-bearing walls six feet thick at the base, was the last skyscraper built that way; its steel-framed south half followed in 1893. The Fisher Building went up on Dearborn in 1896 wearing terra-cotta sea creatures and shells, a visual pun on its owner's name, and the elevated ring that carries the Loop's name was completed in 1897. The postwar building boom brought Mies van der Rohe's three-building Federal Center to Dearborn, and Calder's red Flamingo landed on its plaza in 1974. Open-outcry grain trading at the Board of Trade ended in July 2015.

The area today

Finance, the federal government, law and a university share these blocks. The Fed still works out of its 1922 building, the Board of Trade still stands at LaSalle and Jackson, and the 1914 bank building at 208 South LaSalle has held the JW Marriott in its lower floors since 2010. Federal Plaza fronts the Dirksen and Kluczynski federal buildings, the Union League Club keeps its clubhouse on Jackson, and DePaul's Loop campus expanded in the early 1990s with its renovation of the long-vacant Goldblatt's store at State and Jackson. Symphony Center, rebuilt around Orchestra Hall in 1997, anchors Michigan Avenue. The Red Line stops at Jackson and State and the Blue Line at Jackson and Dearborn; the elevated Loop stops at Harold Washington Library on State, with LaSalle/Van Buren and Quincy on its edges.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Jackson or LaSalle, your crowd walks out of the Board of Trade, the Fed and the Federal Center, and it has for generations: Ceres Cafe in the Board of Trade lobby built its name on liquid lunches and a famously heavy pour for traders. The Exchequer on Wabash, under the el, has drawn business people and tourists through decades of Loop ups and downs. Symphony Center, rebuilt around Orchestra Hall, brings an evening crowd of its own to Michigan Avenue.