Video Gaming Terminals in 60616 (Armour Square, Chicago)

History

Prairie Avenue became the city's most fashionable neighborhood after the Fire of 1871, home to the Armour, Field, Kimball and Pullman families. Michigan Avenue became Motor Row, where as many as 116 makes of car were sold, and from 1957 to 1967 the Chess brothers recorded Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Chuck Berry at 2120 S. Michigan.

Around 1912, Chinese living in an enclave at the south edge of the Loop began moving south to Wentworth and Cermak. Armour Square lay wedged between rail lines, expressways and the South Branch, and the Dan Ryan took Chinatown's only nearby parks. Ping Tom's development company, formed in 1984, turned a 32-acre rail yard into Chinatown Square, and by 1999 Chinese residents were over half of Armour Square and moving west into Bridgeport.

Along the lake, Stephen Douglas bought 70 acres in 1852, and Camp Douglas stood between 31st and 33rd Streets in the Civil War. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Douglas and Grand Boulevard formed Bronzeville, the center of Black business and cultural life. Michael Reese Hospital and the Illinois Institute of Technology helped drive Lake Meadows and its neighbors, completed by the mid-1960s.

The area today

The ZIP runs from about 16th Street south to 35th and from the lakefront west to Halsted. Chinatown centers on the 1975 Chinatown Gate on Wentworth, just south of Cermak, with Chinatown Square on Archer, Ping Tom Memorial Park on the river, the Pui Tak Center at 2216 S. Wentworth and the Chinese American Museum of Chicago on 23rd Street; the Red Line stops at Cermak-Chinatown. The Green Line's Cermak-McCormick Place stop opened in 2015 directly west of McCormick Place, within walking distance of Motor Row and Chinatown. In Bronzeville's northern blocks, the Illinois Institute of Technology keeps a landmarked campus. The Sox-35th Red Line and 35th-Bronzeville-IIT Green Line stops sit at the ZIP's southern edge, and its west edge takes in the blocks of Bridgeport east of Halsted.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Wentworth, Archer or Cermak, shops and restaurants radiate from the gate, and until the summer of 2022 Chinatown had no dedicated cocktail bar; drinks came with dim sum or Korean barbecue, or at karaoke bars. On State near 21st, Reggies is a neighborhood bar and music joint with a rooftop deck, and VU Rooftop Bar, high above East Cermak, looks out on Downtown and the lake. On Michigan, Motor Row's old showrooms sit behind sidewalks widened in a City project finished in 2022. On 33rd Street near the ballpark, Cork and Kerry at The Park came to the neighborhood for the Sox, and Bridgeport bars packed for the team's October 2026 playoff games.