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The bungalow grid that keeps Midway’s east side: block after kept block of brick, a park with one of the Southwest Side’s busiest fieldhouses, and a shopping district built inside a factory that once turned out bomber engines.
West Lawn runs south from 59th between Central Park and Cicero, a neighborhood the bungalow boom built in the twenties and the post-war years finished in brick. Midway sits across Cicero, the Orange Line terminal a few minutes away, and the neighborhood’s Polish and Lithuanian founding stock now shares the blocks with one of the city’s strongest Mexican American communities, which keeps 63rd Street’s storefronts busier than most side-street corridors in the city.
The southern end of the neighborhood holds one of Chicago’s stranger industrial afterlives. The vast plant at 76th and Cicero was built in World War II for Dodge to assemble B-29 engines, the largest factory under one roof in the world at the time; Preston Tucker briefly built his famous Tucker 48 sedans there, Ford ran it during Korea, and in the 1960s its shell became Ford City, the shopping center that still carries the name. The Tootsie Roll plant next door has been perfuming the air along Cicero for decades, one of the biggest candy factories on earth hiding in plain sight.
West Lawn Park’s fieldhouse, pool and gyms run one of the busier program calendars on the Southwest Side, and its farmers market fills summer Wednesdays. Errands lean on 63rd, Pulaski and the Ford City boxes, the Orange Line and the airport’s jobs sit minutes west, and the Stevenson and I-294 are both an easy reach. St. Rita of Cascia’s campus and chapel on 63rd remains a Southwest Side institution.
Chicago bungalows in long, unbroken rows north of 63rd, post-war brick Georgians, Cape Cods and raised ranches filling south toward Ford City, with lots and alleys kept to a standard that makes the grid photogenic. It remains one of the more attainable stretches of the bungalow belt, and houses tend to pass between people who already know the block. Our home styles guide covers every form here, and the joint Chicago Lawn guide covers Marquette Park’s side of the grid.
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