Living in Washington Park: a neighborhood guide

The lay of the land

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux drew Washington Park in 1871 as the western half of their great South Park plan, a vast open meadow flowing into lagoons, and it still works exactly as drawn: cricket and softball on the meadow, herons in the lagoon arms, the arboretum edges going gold in October. The DuSable Black History Museum, the country’s oldest independent museum of Black history and culture, holds the park’s 1910 landmark building, and Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time, a hundred feet of hooded figures finished in 1922, faces down the Midway Plaisance at the park’s southeast corner.

The neighborhood west of the park carries the greystone and boulevard DNA of the mid South Side, with Garfield Boulevard running the link in the historic boulevard chain.

Getting around

The Green Line’s Garfield stop sits at the neighborhood’s heart and the Red Line’s Garfield stop at its western edge, both about fifteen minutes from the Loop. Hyde Park and the University of Chicago are one park away east, a fact that shapes rental demand here.

The housing stock

Greystones and brick two-flats on the park-facing streets and boulevards, courtyard buildings near the L, frame cottages between, and new infill arriving near the Green Line. Park-facing stone a train stop from the Loop and a walk from a great university is a rare combination at these prices; read our building-reading guide and investment guide, and we will show you which blocks the restorers reached first.

The neighborhoods inside Washington Park

Washington Park is community area 40 of Chicago’s 77, on the South 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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