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The lakefront from Roosevelt Road down to 26th Street: the South Loop’s newer half, the Central Station towers, the Prairie Avenue mansions where the city’s first fortunes lived, Motor Row, McCormick Place and the Museum Campus. Community area 33, about 30,000 residents, and more of them every year.
The Near South Side runs from Roosevelt Road on the north to 26th Street on the south, with Lake Michigan on the east and a western edge that follows the river down to 18th, then Clark Street, then the rail corridor past Cermak. The Loop community area ends at Roosevelt, so the South Loop is split: Printers Row and Dearborn Park are officially in the Loop, and the blocks south of Roosevelt (Central Station, the Prairie Avenue District, Motor Row) are Near South Side. Residents use one name for all of it, and so does our South Loop guide.
Burnham Park, the Museum Campus, Soldier Field, Northerly Island and McCormick Place take up the lakefront; the residential blocks sit between Michigan Avenue and the rail lines.
The South Loop south of Roosevelt is the residential heart: the towers and townhouses along Michigan, Indiana and Prairie, the Roosevelt Collection, and the blocks toward 18th. Central Station is the development that began in 1990 on the old Illinois Central rail yards, named for the terminal that stood at 12th Street from the 1890s; One Museum Park and its neighbors are its landmarks now.
The Prairie Avenue District is what is left of the street where Chicago’s richest families lived after the fire: the Glessner House, the Clarke House (the oldest in the city) and Second Presbyterian Church, all open to visitors. Motor Row is the run of early automobile showrooms on Michigan Avenue south of Cermak, a landmark district that has become music venues, offices and lofts. The Museum Campus holds the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium; nobody lives on it, but everybody here walks to it.
Fort Dearborn’s garrison was attacked here in 1812 as it retreated along the lake. The city took the area in when it extended its limits to 31st Street in 1853, and after the fire of 1871 Prairie Avenue held the finest mansions in Chicago, until the Levee vice district next door and the wealth moving north to the Gold Coast emptied it out. The Levee prospered until the city shut it in 1912.
Burnham Park and the museums were built in the 1920s and 1930s, the Century of Progress fair ran on the lakefront in 1933 and 1934, and McCormick Place opened in 1960, burned in 1967 and reopened in 1971. The turn back to housing came late: Dearborn Park began on the old Dearborn Station rail yards in 1977, Central Station in 1990, and the Wintrust Arena opened in 2017.
Roosevelt station is the hub, with the Red, Green and Orange Lines; the Green Line’s Cermak-McCormick Place station, opened in 2015, serves the south end. Metra Electric stops at Museum Campus, 18th Street and McCormick Place. Lake Shore Drive and the Lakefront Trail run the east edge, and the Stevenson and the Dan Ryan start at the southwest corner.
Nearly everything was built after 1990: high-rise condominiums along the park and the lake, mid-rise and townhouse rows on the Central Station land, loft conversions in Motor Row and the old printing and warehouse buildings toward the river, and a handful of landmark survivors on Prairie and Indiana. That makes this one of the few places in the city where a buyer chooses between a 2005 tower and a 2022 one rather than between a 1905 two-flat and a 1925 bungalow.
Assessments and the building’s reserves decide a lot here; our condo rules guide and the questions to ask cover what to read before an offer.
Partly. Roosevelt Road is the official line: Printers Row and Dearborn Park north of it are in the Loop community area, and the South Loop south of it (Central Station, the Prairie Avenue District, Motor Row) is the Near South Side, community area 33.
The South Loop south of Roosevelt, Central Station, the Prairie Avenue Historic District, Motor Row, the Museum Campus, Soldier Field, Northerly Island and McCormick Place, between Roosevelt Road and 26th Street along the lake.
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