Video Gaming Terminals in 60633 (Hegewisch, Chicago)

History

The neighborhood's namesake, the president of the U.S. Rolling Stock Company, set up a workers' town beside a rail line in 1883 and moved his company about 10 miles east to border it. The two canals he announced, one to shorten the Calumet River and one to connect Wolf Lake to Lake Michigan, were never built, and the town fell far short of the 10,000 residents projected by 1885. Chicago annexed Hegewisch in 1889. Joseph H. Brown and other industrialists built steel mills in and around it, drawing Polish, Yugoslavian, Czechoslovakian, Swedish and Irish workers. The South Park Commission bought land for a neighborhood park in 1908, and the fieldhouse at what became Mann Park was finished in 1934. Ford began building cars at its Torrence Avenue plant on the Calumet River in 1924. After Wisconsin Steel closed in 1980, layoffs shrank the population; residents then blocked a Calumet airport and landfill designations, and since the 1960s many Mexican American families have moved in.

The area today

Hegewisch sits against the Indiana line in the city's far southeast corner, set apart from the rest of Chicago by freeways, natural areas and industry. Its business district centers on Baltimore and Brandon avenues. Hegewisch station, at 13730 S. Brainard Ave., is the neighborhood's South Shore Line stop. Mann Park, at 3035 E. 130th St., has two gymnasiums and seven ball fields. Wolf Lake straddles the state line, and the Illinois side is William W. Powers State Recreation Area, entered off Avenue O. The ZIP also takes in Torrence Avenue's industrial edge along the Calumet River, where Ford's Chicago Assembly Plant builds the Explorer.

Bars and restaurants here

On Baltimore Avenue, Chicago Magazine's July 2026 guide calls Steve's Lounge, at 13200 S. Baltimore Ave., famous in the neighborhood for its Friday fish fry, and City Cast Chicago's guide also recommends the Friday-evening fish fry. Old Time Tap, on Brandon Avenue, is a fun, welcoming local bar in a red-brick building that dates to 1906, and its owner says the bar has been around since the 1940s. Taqueria El Taquin, at 13307 S. Brandon Ave., is one of the few sit-down restaurants in the neighborhood, according to Old Time Tap's owner.