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A narrow strip along the Dan Ryan that holds two of the city’s best-known places: Chinatown at its north end and the White Sox park at its south. Armour Square, community area 34, runs from 18th Street to Pershing Road between the railroad tracks and the expressway, with the park it is named for in the middle.
Armour Square is bounded by 18th Street on the north, Pershing Road on the south, the Union Pacific tracks on the west and the Dan Ryan Expressway on the east, a strip a few blocks wide and two miles long. It takes its name from Armour Square Park at 33rd and Shields, which took its name from the Armour meatpacking family. About 14,000 people live in it, most of them in Chinatown at the north end.
The expressway and the tracks make hard edges: Bridgeport is across the tracks to the west, Bronzeville and the IIT campus across the Ryan to the east, the South Loop across the river to the north.
Chinatown is the north end, around Cermak and Wentworth, where the community moved in 1912 from its first home near Clark and Van Buren: the On Leong building, Chinatown Square (1993), the Nine Dragon Wall, Ping Tom Park on the river and the branch library on Wentworth. Our Chinatown guide covers it.
The Sox park blocks are the south end around 35th and Shields: Rate Field, where the White Sox have played since 1991, the plaque marking home plate of the original Comiskey Park across the street, and the cottages and two-flats that fill up on game days. Armour Square itself is the middle, around the park and the 31st Street blocks, where the old Italian and Croatian parishes stand and the housing is quietest.
Charles Comiskey moved his St. Paul team to Chicago in 1900 and it became the White Sox; the first Comiskey Park opened in 1910 on a former city dump and stood until 1990, the oldest park in the major leagues by then. The new park opened across 35th Street in 1991 and the old one was demolished. Chinatown’s move south came in 1912, pushed out of the Loop by rising rents and hostility, and the community built along Wentworth and Cermak from then on, adding Chinatown Square on old rail land in the 1990s and Ping Tom Park along the river.
The Dan Ryan, cut through in the early 1960s, took the eastern blocks and fixed the area’s boundary with Bronzeville.
The Red Line runs the length of the area in the expressway median: Cermak-Chinatown and Sox-35th stations, five and ten minutes to the Loop. Metra’s Rock Island line stops at 35th Street, and the Green Line’s 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station is across the Ryan. The Chinatown water taxi runs to the Loop from Ping Tom Park in the warm months. Halsted and Wentworth are the north-south streets, Cermak, 31st and 35th the crossings.
Chinatown has the densest mix: brick three-flats and courtyard buildings from the 1910s and 1920s, the mid-rise senior and family buildings of the last thirty years, and townhouse rows on the old rail land toward the river. The middle and south blocks are workers’ cottages and brick two-flats of the same age as Bridgeport’s next door, with a few small apartment buildings on the corners. Prices near Chinatown have climbed with the demand from families who want to stay near the community; the Sox blocks remain some of the more affordable house-and-yard addresses close to the Loop.
Read our two-flat guide and the building types guide before touring.
Yes. Chinatown is the northern part of Armour Square, Chicago’s official community area 34, which also holds the blocks around the White Sox park and Armour Square Park itself.
On the South Side just south of the Loop, between 18th Street and Pershing Road, with the railroad tracks on the west and the Dan Ryan Expressway on the east.
Rate Field (the old U.S. Cellular Field, and Comiskey Park before that) sits in Armour Square at 35th and Shields. Bridgeport is the neighborhood directly west, across the tracks and Halsted; Bronzeville is east across the Dan Ryan; Chinatown is the north end of Armour Square; Canaryville and Fuller Park are to the south, and McKinley Park a little further west. Most people who want to live near the ballpark end up in Bridgeport or Bronzeville, each within a fifteen-minute walk of the gates.
Written by our team, free, no sign-in.
From a Chinatown three-flat to a cottage by the ballpark, we work the whole strip. Tell us what you are after and we will send what is coming up.
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