Video Gaming Terminals in 60659 (West Ridge, Chicago)

History

German and Luxembourger farmers settled the West Ridge side in the 1830s and 1840s. On the North Park side a village was platted in 1855, and German and Swedish farmers grew vegetables along the river. After 1900 brickyards moved onto the clay near Kedzie Avenue, and the 1909 construction of the North Shore Channel added to the supply. A 160-acre tract at Bryn Mawr and Pulaski, made up of the nurseryman Pehr Samuel Peterson's former tree nursery and nearby farmland, became the city's Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, which opened in 1915 and closed in 1974. The 1920s filled the blocks with bungalows and two-flats: West Ridge grew from about 7,500 people in 1920 to almost 40,000 by 1930, and North Park's population tripled. Residents had formed the River Park District in 1917; it bought the Green Briar tract in 1925 and in 1930 leased a stretch of the channel's east bank, which became Legion Park. The Granville Garden Apartments, built in 1938 on the 6200 block of Hoyne, were one of the largest housing projects Chicago saw in the 1930s. Mather Park, planned in 1946 along Peterson Avenue, opened in 1959.

The area today

The ZIP runs roughly from Bryn Mawr Avenue north to Devon Avenue and from Damen Avenue west to Pulaski Road. West Ridge and North Park meet at the North Shore Channel near Kedzie Avenue, and a Lincoln Square strip between Western and Damen, south of Peterson, takes the southeast corner. No "L" stop falls inside it; the 49B North Western bus runs Western Avenue between Howard Street and the Brown Line. East of Pulaski, the sanitarium grounds hold Peterson Park and the North Park Village Nature Center, with forest, prairie, wetland and oak savanna a short walk apart. Legion Park follows the channel, Mather Park adjoins Mather High School, and West Ridge Nature Park, dedicated in 2015, occupies the northwest corner of Rosehill Cemetery. Devon forms the northern edge; Block Club's 2026 guide describes South and Southeast Asian businesses along it, stretching for more than a mile between Seeley and California.

Bars and restaurants here

On Lincoln Avenue, American Blues Theater opened its first permanent home in 2023 at 5627 N. Lincoln, at Talman Avenue. The company, founded in 1985, took over a former drugstore building and fitted it with a lobby bar.