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The neighborhood that got the first great neighborhood park: 69 acres of lagoon and lawn opened in 1902 as a national model, ringed by cottages and two-flats, with the country’s first planned manufacturing district’s clock tower still standing guard on Pershing.
When McKinley Park opened in 1902, its 69 acres of lagoon, ballfields and fieldhouse were a radical idea, a great park built not downtown but in a workers’ neighborhood, and it worked so well that a national magazine called it the beginning of the neighborhood-park movement that Chicago then exported to the country. The lagoon still gets fished, the loop still gets run, and the winter sledding hill still gets mobbed, one hundred and twenty years on.
The neighborhood wraps the park’s north and west, cottages and two-flats between Archer’s diagonal and Bubbly Creek, with 35th Street and Archer carrying the storefronts. On Pershing runs the Central Manufacturing District, the first planned industrial district in the United States, whose 1915 brick campus and landmark clock tower once housed everything from Wrigley’s gum to the Spiegel catalog; parts still work, parts await their next act, and the tower is one of the South Side’s great unsung silhouettes.
On Iron Street by the creek, Marz Community Brewing pours some of the city’s most inventive beer in a taproom that doubles as an art space, reason enough for North Siders to learn the Orange Line’s 35th/Archer stop.
The 35th/Archer Orange Line stop puts the Loop about fifteen minutes away, Archer’s buses run around the clock, and the Stevenson is a minute up Damen or Ashland. Errands lean on Archer and 35th, with Bridgeport’s Halsted corridor and Pilsen’s 18th Street both a short hop. The park’s fieldhouse, pool and leagues do the community’s scheduling, exactly as designed in 1902.
Frame workers cottages and brick two-flats from the 1880s through the 1920s, bungalows on the quieter streets, and a growing count of rehabs as buyers priced out of Bridgeport and Pilsen discover the park. Two-flats near the park remain one of the South Side’s better owner-occupant propositions. Bring our investment guide and older-homes guide to showings, and read the joint Bridgeport guide for the blocks across Bubbly Creek.
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