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A sliver of a neighborhood most maps rush past: a few streets wide between the expressway and the tracks, named for a Chief Justice, home to a lovely old park and a nature center its neighbors built with their own hands.
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.
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.
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.
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