Video Gaming Terminals in 60644 (Austin, Chicago)

History

Henry Austin's 1865 temperance settlement ran from Chicago Avenue to Madison Street, between Laramie Avenue and Austin Boulevard. Transit, chiefly the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad and the Lake Street Elevated, shaped its growth from a country village into a dense neighborhood between 1870 and 1920. Farther south, the West Park District acquired farmland at the city's western edge in 1912 and 1913, and Jens Jensen designed Columbus Park on it. Greek families who settled in south Austin by the 1930s built the Byzantine-style Assumption church. Loretto Hospital began as Austin Hospital, built in 1923 as a proprietary hospital owned by a group of west-side physicians; the Sisters of Saint Casimir bought it in December 1938, and it opened to the public as Loretto on January 16, 1939. In 1952 Cook County took nine acres along Columbus Park's southern edge for the Eisenhower Expressway. By 1980 more than 96 percent of south Austin's residents were African American, and like other West Side communities, Austin saw housing disinvestment, vacancy and demolition and a loss of jobs and commerce.

The area today

Roughly, the ZIP runs from Chicago Avenue south to Roosevelt Road and from Austin Boulevard east to a couple of blocks past Cicero Avenue; Chicago Avenue itself falls in the next ZIP north. Lake Street's elevated Green Line stops at Cicero, Laramie and Central, and Austin station marks the ZIP's western edge. On Lake Street, Austin Town Hall Park at 5610 W. Lake St. is built around a brick Georgian Revival fieldhouse finished in 1929, with a pool, a gymnasium and a theater. Columbus Park, at 500 S. Central Ave., covers 140.65 acres, with a nine-hole golf course, a fishing lagoon and a Jensen council ring. Loretto Hospital sits at 645 S. Central Ave., just off I-290.

Bars and restaurants here

If your room is on Madison Street, your neighbors include TNT Rooftop at 5405 W. Madison, an upscale restaurant with a rooftop patio that opened in December 2023 in a building its owners bought in 2019; the same building holds a boutique and an event space. A couple of blocks west, Uncle Remus Saucy Fried Chicken at 5611 W. Madison has been a fixture on the West Side since the 1960s and is run by the second generation of its family. On Lake Street, New Sound Cafe at 5958 W. Lake roasts its own coffee in a storefront that was once a gospel record shop, opened in the 1970s, which gave the cafe its name.