Video Gaming Terminals in 60624 (West Garfield Park, Chicago)

History

The park came first. The Illinois legislature created the West Park Commission in 1869, and the park, first named Central Park, took President Garfield's name in 1881. The North Western Railway built its shops north of Kinzie Street in 1873, and the Lake Street "L" arrived in 1893. Sears put up its administration building at 3333 W. Arthington, two stories in 1905 and three more in 1914, and the company kept its headquarters there for more than sixty years, until it moved downtown in 1974. After 1914, Madison Street became West Garfield Park's commercial heart, with department stores, movie palaces and hotels in what merchants called the Madison-Crawford district. On Roosevelt Road, Russian Jews, North Lawndale's largest group in the 1910s, built a commercial strip. Residents of the southern blocks were displaced when the Congress Expressway was built in the 1950s. Madison and Pulaski was the center of the rioting in 1965 and 1968; the buildings that burned on Madison in 1968 were not replaced, and businesses that lost their insurance left.

The area today

Roughly, the ZIP runs from Kedzie Avenue west to Kenton Avenue and from Roosevelt Road north to Chicago Avenue. It takes in East and West Garfield Park, the north end of North Lawndale and a strip of the Humboldt Park community area that begins just north of Kinzie Street. Garfield Park covers 173 acres, with the Garfield Park Conservatory at 300 N. Central Park Ave. and the Gold Dome fieldhouse, a Chicago Landmark since 2009. The Green Line runs above Lake Street, stopping at Conservatory-Central Park Drive and at Pulaski, with Kedzie at the ZIP's eastern edge. On Madison, the address 4305 W. belongs to the Sankofa Village Wellness Center, which the Sun-Times reported open in June 2026, and in October 2025 Block Club reported that the City's Madison Street Corridor Study was looking at the street from Hoyne to Kenton avenues. At Homan Square, the Sears administration building on Arthington is a Chicago Landmark, and the old Sears tower reopened in 2015 as Nichols Tower.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Lake Street under the Green Line, you work near the Lakeside Bar at St. Louis Avenue. Across the avenue, Semaphore Cafe opened at the start of 2026, and Austin Weekly News reported in February 2026 that East Garfield Park does not have much in the way of sit-down restaurants. On Madison, just west of Pulaski, a Chicago Park District plaza with a roller rink and a performance stage serves as an outdoor gathering space, and the Sankofa center is farther west. Roosevelt Road, along the ZIP's southern edge, is the old commercial strip of North Lawndale's Jewish community.