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The Northwest Side’s front door: a bungalow neighborhood built around the busiest transit knot outside downtown, with a 1930 movie palace, a free museum for one of Chicago’s great painters, and a Polish festival that takes over Labor Day weekend.
Jefferson Park calls itself the Gateway to the Northwest Side, and for once the slogan is just a fact: the Jefferson Park Transit Center at Milwaukee and Lawrence stacks the Blue Line, the Metra Union Pacific Northwest line and a dozen bus routes in one building, so the Loop, O’Hare and the northwest suburbs are all a single seat away. The neighborhood grew up as a farm-town crossroads in the 1850s, where the old plank roads met, and it has been collecting travelers ever since.
Around the station spreads one of the city’s tidiest bungalow grids, cut by Milwaukee, Higgins and Lawrence, with Gladstone Park’s blocks to the northwest and the forest preserves of the North Branch a short ride up Elston.
The Gateway Theatre opened on Lawrence in 1930 as one of the city’s grand movie palaces, and its Baroque tower, modeled on Warsaw’s Royal Castle, still owns the skyline here. As the Copernicus Center it now runs concerts, film festivals and community events year round, and its Taste of Polonia festival each Labor Day weekend is one of the biggest Polish festivals in the country, four days of music and food that pull people from three states.
Two blocks away on Higgins, the Ed Paschke Art Center keeps a free permanent collection of the Jefferson Park-raised painter’s electric, neon-hued portraits, plus his recreated studio. It is open daily, it costs nothing, and it is the kind of place most of the city has not discovered yet.
Milwaukee and Lawrence carry the storefronts: Polish delis and bakeries that predate the current wave, newer cafes and taprooms that came with it, and the Jeff Park Arts scene that has quietly filled vacant corners with galleries and music rooms. Jefferson Memorial Park behind the station has the fieldhouse and pool, Wilson Park’s quieter squares sit north, and the Dunning and Portage Park corridors are minutes away. Drivers get the Kennedy at Lawrence or Foster in under five minutes.
Brick bungalows by the block, interwar Georgians and Cape Cods, two-flats near the busier streets, and a ring of newer condo and apartment buildings within a walk of the Transit Center, including some of the Northwest Side’s first transit-oriented buildings. Prices sit well below the North Side lakefront for the same commute time, which is the neighborhood’s quiet advantage. Our home styles field guide covers the bungalow forms here, and the joint Portage Park guide covers the wider bungalow belt around Six Corners.
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