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A neighborhood named for one of the great American parks: 372 acres of Olmsted meadow and lagoon, a museum of Black history in the park’s round-cornered landmark, a hundred-foot sculpture standing over the Midway’s west end, and greystone streets a train stop from it all.
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.
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.
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.
Written by our team, free, no sign-in.
We can walk the park-facing blocks with you and lay out the owner-occupant math a two-flat here supports. Tell us what you are after.
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