Living in South Chicago & the East Side: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

US Steel’s South Works filled the lakefront here for a century, employing tens of thousands, and its 1992 closing left the largest vacant site in Chicago. The next chapter has finally been named: the old mill land is planned as a quantum computing research campus, one of the biggest investments the Far South Side has ever drawn, and worth watching whatever pace it takes. Steelworkers Park already turned the ore wall ruins into climbing walls and prairie, and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the city’s oldest Mexican parish, has anchored the neighborhood since 1923.

Across the Calumet River, the East Side keeps its own tight grid of brick around Calumet Park, 200 lakefront acres with a beach, a grand fieldhouse and the border with Indiana in sight.

Getting around

The Metra Electric’s South Chicago branch ends at 93rd and Commercial, running electric trains downtown roughly every half hour, buses cover the grid, and the Skyway passes overhead with ramps close by. Drivers reach the Loop by Lake Shore Drive’s south end in about twenty-five minutes off-peak.

The housing stock

Brick two-flats, workers cottages and bungalows built for the mill workforce, sturdy, plain and priced among the lowest on the lakefront side of the city. For a first building near a beach, a park and a train, the arithmetic is worth running: our investment guide and building-reading guide are the place to start, and the foundations guide handles the century-old basement questions.

The neighborhoods inside South Chicago

South Chicago is community area 46 of Chicago’s 77, on the Far Southeast Side, and one of the areas whose official name is the everyday one too: no neighborhood inside it goes by another name.

The community areas have been the city’s official map since the 1920s; the neighborhood names inside them are the ones people use. All 77 on one interactive map.

Guides worth reading before you tour here

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