Video Gaming Terminals in 60611 (Near North Side, Chicago)

History

Early maps showed little but lake east of Pine Street, today's Michigan Avenue. Sand piled up north of a pier built at the river mouth in 1834, squatters settled the "Sands," and in 1857 lakefront owners had the mayor clear them out. The McCormick family built homes near their Reaper Works between Pine and Sand Streets. In 1886 George Wellington Streeter stranded his boat on the Sands and claimed the land that formed around it as his own "Deestric of Lake Michigan"; the courts rejected the claim in 1918, but the name Streeterville stayed. Municipal Pier opened just north of the river mouth in 1916 and was renamed Navy Pier in 1927. The Michigan Avenue Bridge opened in 1920, and during the 1920s Pine Street was rebuilt as North Michigan Avenue, lined with the Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower and, at Oak Street, the Drake Hotel, built between 1918 and 1920; developer Arthur Rubloff named the stretch the Magnificent Mile in the 1940s. The Water Tower and Pumping Station at Chicago Avenue, the only public buildings in the area to survive the fire of 1871, became a Chicago Landmark district in 1971.

The area today

The City's ZIP boundary runs roughly from the river to Bellevue Place and from State Street to the lake: Streeterville, the Magnificent Mile, the east side of River North and the south end of the Gold Coast. Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Lurie Children's and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab fill Streeterville's blocks, with the Museum of Contemporary Art and Lookingglass Theatre nearby; Loyola's Water Tower Campus sits at Rush and Pearson, across from the Water Tower. The Michigan Avenue hotels and the eight buildings of the East Lake Shore Drive District keep the sidewalks busy, and after a decade of storefront turnover new stores are opening on the avenue again. The Red Line subway runs under State Street, the ZIP's western edge, stopping at Grand and at Chicago. After dark the traffic goes to Rush Street and, in summer, to Navy Pier.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Rush Street, you are on the strip at Rush and Bellevue that Chicagoans call the Viagra Triangle, where the renovated Carmine's reopened in January 2026 among Gibsons, Tavern on Rush and Hugo's Frog Bar. Streeterville is a different trade, set among hospitals, hotels and campuses: Lizzie McNeill's pub on the riverfront and D4 Irish Pub & Cafe sit in Streeterville, and Pippin's Tavern is on East Chicago Avenue. Under Michigan Avenue, the Billy Goat, once the newspaper reporters' hangout, draws construction and boat workers and tourists at lunch.