Video Gaming Terminals in 60607 (Near West Side, Chicago)

History

Food built the north half of this ZIP. Randolph Street was a wholesale produce market, and two blocks north Fulton Market Street was a meatpacking district; the City's landmark fact sheet counts branch operations of Armour, Swift and Morris among its buildings. South of Harrison, immigrant colonies filled the Near West Side. Greeks gathered in a settlement called the Delta, between Harrison, Halsted, Polk and Blue Island, Italians settled between Polk and Taylor, and in 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in the middle of it. In the second half of the twentieth century the Chicago Circle expressway interchange took out a large part of the Greek settlement, and building the University of Illinois at Chicago razed most of the Hull House complex and the old Italian neighborhood around it. Greektown shrank and shifted north along Halsted, while Taylor Street kept its Italian restaurants. The City designated the Fulton-Randolph Market District a Chicago Landmark in 2015.

The area today

This ZIP runs from Kinzie Street south to Roosevelt Road and from Halsted Street west to Ashland Avenue, and, east of Halsted, the blocks from Van Buren Street south to roughly 16th Street, out to Wells Street. Greektown's Halsted blocks between Monroe and Van Buren run along its eastern edge. Randolph Street is Restaurant Row, and Fulton Market's old warehouses now hold restaurants, galleries, condominiums and offices. McDonald's corporate headquarters took the place of the Harpo Studios building at Washington and Carpenter, demolished in 2016. The Green and Pink lines stop at Morgan on Lake Street; the Blue Line's UIC-Halsted stop is entered from Halsted, Morgan and Peoria. Little Italy is the Taylor Street strip between Halsted and Ashland.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Randolph, you are on Restaurant Row, where chef-driven dining rooms and cocktail venues share the street, with more of the same on Fulton Market Street, the old meatpacking strip two blocks north. In Little Italy the older rooms are family-run Italian restaurants handed down through generations, Tufano's Vernon Park Tap among them, and the students and young professionals the university brought in have filled out the newer places on Taylor Street between Halsted and Ashland. On Halsted, Greektown is a small cluster of Greek restaurants between Monroe and Van Buren, and its summer street festival draws crowds to the sidewalks.