Living in Fuller Park: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

Fuller Park runs from Pershing to Garfield Boulevard in a strip barely half a mile wide, pinned between the Rock Island embankment and the Dan Ryan. It is named for Melville Fuller, the Chicago lawyer who became Chief Justice of the United States, and it was a workers’ neighborhood for the rail yards and the stockyards next door. The Ryan’s construction in the 1960s took a broad swath of its houses and walled it off from Bridgeport, and the neighborhood has been quietly holding on ever since, small, tight, and largely unknown even to lifelong Chicagoans.

The park, and Eden Place

Fuller Park itself, the green square the neighborhood is named for, keeps a dignified early-1900s fieldhouse, a pool and ball fields, the civic heart of the place. The story worth telling is Eden Place Nature Center on Stewart: neighbors led by Michael and Amelia Howard turned an illegal dumping ground into three acres of prairie, wetland and farm animals, and it has hosted school groups and city visitors for two decades. It is one of the most quietly inspiring places on the South Side.

The housing stock

Frame cottages and brick two-flats from the stockyards era, with plenty of open lots between them, at prices as low as anywhere in the city. A purchase here is a restoration commitment and an act of neighborhood faith, and the arithmetic can work for the right buyer: our foundations guide and older-homes guide are the homework, and we will give you the block-by-block read before you decide anything.

The neighborhoods inside Fuller Park

Fuller Park is community area 37 of Chicago’s 77, on the South Side, and one of the areas whose official name is the everyday one too: no neighborhood inside it goes by another name.

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

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