Homes for sale in
Chicago Lawn.

The community that became Chicago Lawn was founded by John F. Eberhart in 1871 and annexed by Chicago in 1889, but it stayed mostly farmland with scattered settlements until the 1920s. In that decade developers lured managers and skilled stockyard workers into the new bungalow belt, and the population jumped from 14,000 to 47,000 between 1920 and 1930. German and Irish families arrived first from Back of the Yards and Englewood, followed by Poles, Bohemians, and Lithuanians. The Lithuanian community became so established that its network of institutions earned the area the nickname Lithuanian Gold Coast, and the Lithuanian Sisters of St. Casimir founded Holy Cross Hospital in 1928 and Maria High School in 1952. In 1935 the Lithuanian community installed an Art Deco monument in Marquette Park honoring aviators Steponas Darius and Stasys Girenas, who died in the 1933 crash of the Lituanica.

In the mid-1960s Chicago Lawn became a focal point of the open-housing struggle, and in August 1966, as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. led a march into Marquette Park that met a violent reaction, with King himself struck by a rock. King called the Marquette Park march the first step on a 1,000 mile journey, and the campaign helped build national momentum toward the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. The neighborhood's demographics then changed dramatically, since non-Hispanic whites were still the largest group at 43 percent in 1990, but by the 2000 census African Americans were the largest group at 53 percent, with Hispanic residents at 35 percent. A Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial, built from nearly 800 oversized bricks as a nod to Chicago's bungalows, was erected in the park in 2016.