Living in Chicago Lawn & West Lawn: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

Marquette Park is the reason the map looks the way it does: the largest park on the Southwest Side, with lagoons, a nine-hole golf course, a rose garden and miles of shoreline path, and the neighborhoods grew up around it in rings of brick. Chicago Lawn runs east of the park toward Western, West Lawn west toward Midway’s edge, and 63rd Street ties them together with one of the longest commercial runs on the South Side.

The park’s edge carries real history: the Darius and Girenas monument honors the Lithuanian aviators whose 1933 transatlantic flight ended in tragedy, and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial remembers his 1966 march here, a marker the neighborhood built itself.

The everyday

63rd Street and Kedzie carry supermercados, taquerias, and bakery cases that empty by noon on Sundays; the old Lithuanian presence still shows in institutions near the park. Midway sits at West Lawn’s shoulder, which means jobs and a ten-minute ride to a boarding gate, and the Orange Line from there.

The housing stock

Bungalows by the mile, joined by Cape Cods, Georgians and two-flats, nearly all brick, nearly all on the standard lot, with park-facing blocks the local prize. It is exactly the stock our brick guide and home styles field guide cover, and the house systems guide answers the mechanical questions these houses raise at inspection.

Guides worth reading before you tour here

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