Homes along Hamlin Avenue line the border of West Garfield Park and East Garfield Park. Photo: Brendan Brown

The Story of Garfield Park

• Nestled into the west side of Chicago and bordered by train tracks and fields, West Garfield Park is a historic Chicago neighborhood that has undergone considerable changes over the years. Once the site of a major shopping district and bustling commerce, the neighborhood has been forced to weather a number of economic changes.
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What most people call Garfield Park is a combination of two Chicago community areas: East Garfield Park and West Garfield Park. They get their names from the park in the western portion of East Garfield Park.

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In its early days, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, Garfield Park was home to mostly Irish, German, Italian, Russian, and Jewish immigrants. A small shopping district once sat along Madison Street in West Garfield Park in the 1920s, and the Guyon Hotel, now on the National Register of Historic Places, once looked over nearby Washington Street.

According to the Garfield Park Community Council, “the Depression and World War II took a toll on the community. By 1947, the area was so needy that the Daughters of Charity opened Marillac House to serve the poor.” The Eisenhower Expressway a decade later displaced many people whose homes were torn down by its construction. In the 1960s, African Americans began moving into Garfield Park, while the Chicago Housing Authority built public housing structures.

In the days following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who had visited and helped organize in the community in the years prior), riots broke out in Garfield Park. On April 8, 1968, just a few days after the assassination, a headline on the Chicago Tribune’s front page read, “Madison St. a Blackened Scar in Heart of Chicago.” Reporter Robert Wiedrich wrote, “This was the west side of Chicago, where for nearly 48 hours, virtually uncontrolled rioting and looting had raged in the flare of burning buildings.” The article recounts how a “water stained dress dummy lay toppled on its side in the show window of a corner store.” The National Guard was brought in, and the Tribune counted at least seven deaths tied directly to the riots. Much of Madison Street was devastated, and middle-class residents and businesses left.

Today, the community still suffers from poverty, unemployment, and crime. But groups such as the Garfield Park Community Council are working to revitalize parts of their community, searching for neighborhood-grown solutions to reinvigorate a community that has suffered from disinvestment. The Garfield Park Conservatory’s beauty (read more below) also draws people to the community year-round. The Green Line makes stops in Garfield Park at California, Kedzie, Conservatory-Central Park Drive, Pulaski, and Cicero. The Blue Line also runs through the southern portion of the two community areas, stopping at Kedzie-Homan, Pulaski, and Cicero.

The Garfield Park Conservatory has 4.5 acres of greenery under glass. Photo: Brendan Brown

Neighborhood Spotlight: Garfield Park Conservatory

Garfield Park, originally called Central Park, was one of three parks on the city’s West Side (including Humboldt and Douglas parks). It was designed by William LeBaron Jenney and opened in 1874; it was renamed in 1881 for President James Garfield after his assassination. According to the park district, when Jens Jensen was appointed Chief Landscape Architect of the west side parks in 1905, he brought his pioneering, naturalistic “Prairie Style” of landscape design.

In 1908, the Conservatory opened. Designed by Jensen, Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin, and New York engineering firm Hitchings and Company, it is meant to look like Midwestern haystacks.

In June 2011, a hailstorm severely damaged the Conservatory, shattering half the glass panes of the roofs in various structures. After $5 million in repairs, the conservatory reopened in 2015.

Today, it remains one of the largest in the nation and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors can see the Palm House with its 65-foot ceilings, the Fern Room, a Desert House, a Show House that hosts flower shows every year, outdoor gardens, and more.

Things to Do

Take a tour of the Garfield Park Conservatory led by teen docents as part of the Urban Roots program. Then walk across the street and through the park to see the Gold Dome Field House.

Story by Monique Wingard

Community Area 26, 5 miles W of the Loop. Before 1873, most people who saw the farms scattered on the square mile west of the future Garfield Park were on their way somewhere else. The Barry Point Road (Fifth Avenue) headed southwest to Lyons. Truck farmers going to Chicago and stagecoaches traveling west to Moreland ( Austin ) and Oak Park took the Elgin Road (Lake Street). The West Chicago Park Commission established three West Side parks in 1870, naming the one in the middle “Central Park.” In 1873, the North Western Railway built its shops north of Kinzie, initiating the area's urbanization. Several thousand employees and their families, mostly Scandinavians and Irish, built the village of Central Park south of Kinzie. The local school was named after G. W. Tilton, superintendent of the railroad shops. Residents from as far south as Harrison Street bought their groceries on Lake Street.

Although the village was primarily residential, it also offered recreation. Central Park, renamed for the assassinated President Garfield in 1881, featured an administrative building with a gilded dome, exhibit houses for exotic plants, picnic groves, and a bicycle track. Horse-racing fans went to the Garfield Park Race Track, founded as a gentlemen's club in 1878 and converted for gambling 10 years later. Taverns catering to spectators lined Madison Street. The Garfield Park track, however, could not compete with the prestigious Washington Park course or the Hawthorne track. In 1892, the Chicago police raided the Garfield Park track three times. During the last raid, a horseman shot two police officers and was himself killed, sealing racing's fate there. Various spectator shows, including Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, appeared in the arena before it was demolished in the early twentieth century to make way for homes.

The demise of the seedy racetrack opened space for new housing and commerce. A policemen's syndicate sold its members homes on Wilcox Street, nicknamed “Uniform Row.” The establishment of the Sears plant in neighboring North Lawndale drew new residents to the southeast quarter of the area. Lake Street, shadowed by the “L” built in 1893, went into decline and Madison Street took its place as the district's commercial heart. Entrepreneurs opened department stores, movie palaces, and hotels in the newly advertised “Madison-Crawford district” after 1914. Merchants so valued this identification that they led a 19-year fight against the renaming of Crawford Avenue as Pulaski Road, even though Peter Crawford's farm had been in the area of present-day South Lawndale. West Garfield Park's rise was tempered by bank closures, deprivation, and neglect during the Great Depression and World War II, but residents and businesspeople emerged into the postwar years ready to restore its standing.

During the 1950s, however, changes in the West Side prompted some residents to reevaluate that commitment. The new Congress (Eisenhower) Expressway displaced residents from the neighborhood's southern sector. Others homeowners feared that West Garfield Park would experience the same rapid racial change underway in East Garfield Park and North Lawndale. In 1959, when a black family bought a house on the 4300 block of Jackson, white homeowners formed the United Property Group, which opposed further sales to African Americans. The Garfield Park Good Neighbors Council, by contrast, gave a friendly welcome to black homebuyers. These groups unsuccessfully petitioned the state to build the new University of Illinois campus in Garfield Park, hoping to prevent further population change, create a racial buffer zone, and stimulate the local economy.

Middle-class black families did move into the area. Like the whites who were abandoning their homes, they built small organizations and block clubs intended to maintain their new neighborhood. They could not, however, prevent the increasing rolls of absentee landlords from neglecting and overcrowding their apartment buildings. During the early 1960s, West Garfield Park was increasingly stigmatized as a poor, disorganized community by observers who did not see its block-by-block variations or its struggling, unpublicized organizations. Rioting that centered on the Madison-Pulaski intersection in 1965 and 1968 hastened the departure of the remaining white businesspeople from West Garfield Park and further damaged its image.

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In the 1970s, open-housing laws provided Chicago's black middle class with an avenue of escape from the city's increasing poverty and physical decline. In their absence, the area's economic base eroded further, leaving the West Side vulnerable to illegal drug traffic and accompanying crime. Nevertheless, a few organizations dedicated themselves to turning around West Garfield Park. Most notable among these was Bethel New Life, which hoped to enshrine the West Side's past with an oral history project and ensure its future with new and rehabilitated housing.

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