Living in Montclare: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

Montclare fills the pocket between Harlem, the rail embankment and the Belmont-Cragin line, about a square mile of residential calm that grew from an 1870s farm settlement along the old Whiskey Point Road, today’s Grand Avenue. The city annexed it in 1889, the bungalow boom filled it in the 1920s, and it has changed remarkably little since: no L stop, no big corridor of its own, and residents who consider both of those features.

Elmwood Park sits across Harlem, close enough that its Grand Avenue restaurant row functions as Montclare’s dining room, and Galewood, Austin’s leafy northwest corner, borders it across the tracks.

Rutherford Sayre Park

The neighborhood’s green anchor is Rutherford Sayre Park at Grand and Sayre, a pair of formal squares designed in the 1910s and split down the middle by the railroad embankment, one square north, one south, each with its own character and the two joined by an underpass. The fieldhouse, the ballfields and the playgrounds carry the neighborhood’s seasons, and the twin layout makes it one of the odder and more charming park plans in the city.

The housing stock

Brick bungalows and Georgians on quiet one-way streets, frame cottages from the farm-town years near Grand, and post-war brick two-flats scattered through. Lots run a touch wider than the inner Northwest Side, prices sit below Portage Park for comparable brick, and turnover is slow because commutes here tend to be by car or the Metra stops at Mars and Galewood just over the line, both a few minutes away. Our home styles guide reads these blocks well, and the joint Belmont Cragin guide covers the bigger belt east of here.

Guides worth reading before you tour here

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