Video Gaming Terminals in 60642 (West Town, Chicago)

History

The Chicago Land Company bought the tract between Chicago and North avenues in 1853, and William B. Ogden, a major stockholder, directed the dredging of the canal that made it Goose Island. By 1885 the island held thirteen lumber yards, eleven coal yards and two grain elevators. In 1867 thirty Polish families founded the Society of St. Stanislaus Kostka and bought land at Noble and Potomac streets, then at the far edge of the city, to build a mother church for Chicago's Polish Catholics. By the end of the 1890s the parish counted about eight thousand families. When the Kennedy Expressway was planned to take the church in the 1950s, neighbors, Polish-American politicians and parishioners persuaded the planners to shift its path, and St. Stanislaus Kostka is sometimes called "the church that moved an expressway." The West Park Commission bought land for Eckhart Park in 1907. For Pulaski Park it displaced 1,200 people from a crowded, mostly Polish neighborhood of factories and workers' housing, and its 1914 field house was designed to echo Eastern European architecture. Italians had settled along Grand Avenue by the turn of the twentieth century.

The area today

The ZIP runs roughly from Kinzie Street north to North Avenue and from Halsted Street west to Ashland Avenue, with a narrower wedge along the river and Elston Avenue above North. It covers Goose Island, the Noble Street blocks of West Town and the corner of Chicago and Milwaukee avenues, where the Blue Line's Chicago stop is a subway station at 800 N. Milwaukee. Eckhart Park on Chicago Avenue and Pulaski Park on Blackhawk Street each have two gymnasiums. The Salt Shed at 1357 N. Elston, a Morton Salt warehouse built in 1929, reopened as a music venue in 2022, and its owners say boaters on the North Branch stop to listen from the river. On Division, across from the Polish Triangle at the ZIP's western edge, the Chopin Theatre opened in 1918 as a nickelodeon and now presents plays, readings, film and music.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Milwaukee Avenue near the Chicago stop, your neighbor is the Matchbox at 770 N. Milwaukee, a 460-square-foot tavern with 18 seats that began as the Bohemian Club, a package liquor store established in 1945. On Chicago Avenue, Gilda at 1421 W. Chicago is a Basque tavern serving pintxos, which The Infatuation reviewed in July 2026. Along the river on Blackhawk Street, Goose Island Beer Co. opened a brewpub in 2024 next to the Salt Shed; Time Out calls the room especially lively on concert nights and suggests the patio for hearing the music.