Video Gaming Terminals in 60617 (East Side, Chicago)

History

South Chicago began as a settlement of fishermen and farmers at the mouth of the Calumet River. The Brown Iron and Steel Company opened a mill on the Calumet in 1875, and the steelworkers' settlement south of 95th Street became Irondale, renamed South Deering in 1903. A shopping district grew up around Commercial Avenue and 92nd Street to serve the workers at South Works, which U.S. Steel bought in 1901. At its peak South Works had more than 20,000 employees on 600 acres, much of it slag landfill, and it closed in 1992. East of the river, the East Side, once called Taylorville, Goosetown and Colehour, was settled by Germans, Swedes, Croatians, Slovenes and Serbians, and in 1937 police killed 10 strikers during a Memorial Day march on Republic Steel. In South Deering, International Harvester bought Brown's mill in 1902 and announced Wisconsin Steel, which shut in March 1980. Calumet Heights began in 1887 as a subdivision by developer Samuel E. Gross and stayed solidly middle class through the late twentieth century.

The area today

The ZIP covers South Chicago, the East Side, Calumet Heights and South Deering. Metra Electric stops at 93rd Street and Baltimore Avenue, and the CTA's No. 30 South Chicago bus runs from Hegewisch Station to the Red Line at 69th Street. A City land-use plan for South Chicago, still in draft as of March 2026, marks 79th, 83rd, 87th, 91st, 92nd and 93rd streets and Commercial Avenue south of 83rd as mixed-use corridors. On the old South Works land, Steelworkers Park at 87th Street and Lake Shore Drive has a rock-climbing wall built on the mill's ore wall. On the East Side, Ewing Avenue and 106th Street are major commercial corridors, and a chamber of commerce director once called their intersection the neighborhood's downtown. Calumet Park has a beach and a boat launch on Lake Michigan.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Commercial Avenue, you are on the shopping street that grew up beside South Works. On Stony Island Avenue near 87th Street, you sit where Calumet Heights built its postwar shopping area. Out on the East Side, Crow Bar, at 106th Street and Avenue C less than two blocks from the Indiana line, is known as a gathering place for neighbors and for its homemade corned beef and weekly fish fry. Along Ewing Avenue at 94th Street, the Schlitz Brewery-Tied House, built as a first-floor tavern over boarding rooms, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is not open to the public.