Living in Chatham: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

Chatham runs from 79th to 95th between the Dan Ryan and Cottage Grove, and its story is one of the proudest in Chicago housing: in the 1950s and 60s it became one of the country’s strongest neighborhoods of Black homeownership and Black-owned business, home to banks, insurers, and institutions that financed a generation of South Side ownership. Mahalia Jackson bought a brick ranch here in 1956, and the standard she moved into never slipped: these blocks are kept.

79th Street and 87th Street carry the commerce, Cottage Grove frames the east side, and the grid between is nearly all houses.

Getting around

The Red Line runs the Dan Ryan’s median with stops at 79th and 87th, and the Metra Electric’s main line stops at 79th and 83rd on the neighborhood’s east side, so downtown works two ways: the L every few minutes, or an electric train that makes Millennium Station in about twenty. The Ryan and the Skyway put the rest of the region in reach for drivers.

Parks and institutions

Tuley Park is the neighborhood’s living room, fifteen acres with a Prairie-style fieldhouse, courts, and a summer calendar; Cole Park adds ballfields and a playground on the east side. The 79th Street corridor holds long-running restaurants and the barbecue institutions that draw people from across the city, and the neighborhood’s block clubs are among the most active anywhere, the reason the lawns look the way they do.

The housing stock

This is Chicago’s showcase of the mid-century brick ranch: long, low houses with picture windows and manicured setbacks, joined by classic bungalows, Georgians, and sturdy two-flats toward the north end. Most of it is solid masonry from the 1920s through the 1960s. A well-kept ranch here is a lesson in how these houses should be maintained; bring our home styles guide and house systems guide to compare, and the brick guide covers the tuckpointing questions.

The neighborhoods inside Chatham

Chatham is community area 44 of Chicago’s 77, on the Far Southeast Side. The names people use inside it: East Chatham, West Chatham and West Chesterfield.

The community areas have been the city’s official map since the 1920s; the neighborhood names inside them are the ones people use. All 77 on one interactive map.

Guides worth reading before you tour here

Written by our team, free, no sign-in.