Video Gaming Terminals in 60637 (Woodlawn, Chicago)

History

The South Park Commission, created in 1869, hired Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to lay out a 1,055-acre park. In 1881 its western division was named Washington Park and its eastern division Jackson Park, joined by the Midway Plaisance. By 1930 Washington Park was 92 percent Black. Woodlawn, a Dutch farming settlement in the 1850s, had a racetrack, amusement parks and beer gardens in its Washington Park Subdivision; when betting was outlawed in 1905, apartment houses replaced the track. Jackson Park hosted the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The Midway carried the fair's amusements, including the world's first Ferris wheel, and the fair's Fine Arts Palace is now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. In Hyde Park, change stayed modest until two events of the early 1890s: the founding of the University of Chicago and the fair.

The area today

The ZIP runs roughly from 55th Street south to 71st, from State Street east to Stony Island Avenue and the lakefront. It takes in Hyde Park south of 55th, Washington Park, Woodlawn, Jackson Park and a stretch of Greater Grand Crossing south of 63rd Street between State Street and King Drive. The DuSable Black History Museum sits in Washington Park, in the administration building Burnham's firm designed in 1910. The Midway Plaisance links Washington Park to Jackson Park, and its skating rink stands where the Ferris wheel did. Jackson Park holds the museum and 63rd Street Beach, and since June 2026 the Obama Presidential Center at 6001 S. Stony Island Avenue. Green Line trains end at Cottage Grove and 63rd Street.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on 57th Street in Hyde Park, you share a street with the Medici, which ABC7 called a hangout for students and professors for 50 years, back in 2013, and which the Obama Foundation lists among the local eateries it suggests to visitors. On 60th Street, the British-style pub Truth Be Told opened in 2022 inside The Study hotel at 1227 E. 60th; in its first weeks the hotel's operator described the crowd as campus visitors, students and administrators. On Cottage Grove beside the el terminal, Daley's has served Woodlawn since 1892, and its owner describes an earlier Woodlawn as booming with jazz clubs, nightlife, restaurants and bars.