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A steady, owner-kept neighborhood between the Ridge and the Ryan: brick blocks, two Metra stops of its own, a 1940s planned pocket with curving streets, and a library that holds one of the country’s great collections of Black history.
Washington Heights runs from 89th to 107th between the Beverly ridge and the Dan Ryan corridor, and it has spent a century doing the quietly excellent thing: brick bungalows, Georgians and Cape Cods, bought and kept, block clubs that mean it, church cornerstones with old dates. Brainerd, the pocket around its namesake Metra stop, and Longwood Manor, on the ridge’s gentler east slope, are the names locals use; Princeton Park, tucked by the tracks, is a 1940s planned development of hundreds of homes on curving streets, one of that era’s rare large private developments built for Black Chicagoans.
The Carter G. Woodson Regional Library on Halsted, named for the father of Black history, houses the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, the Midwest’s largest archive of Afro-American history and literature, with papers of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks and Timuel Black among its holdings. Researchers travel across the country for a reading room this neighborhood walks to.
Two Rock Island stops sit inside the neighborhood, Brainerd at 89th and the Washington Heights stop at 103rd, with the Beverly branch’s stations one ridge west, and downtown runs about half an hour. The Ryan, the Red Line’s 95th terminal and the 95th Street corridor are minutes east.
Brick bungalows and Georgians at full strength, ranches on the later blocks, and Princeton Park’s distinctive rows, nearly all of it owner-kept and priced below the ridge neighborhoods it borders. Condition is usually the good kind of boring here; our brick guide and home styles field guide make the walk-through vocabulary easy.
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