Homes for sale in
Garfield Ridge.

Garfield Ridge takes its name from Garfield Boulevard (55th Street), a main east-west thoroughfare, and from a modest topographic rise left behind by the retreat of glacial Lake Michigan. Formerly known as Archer Limits, the area was for much of the 19th century a place people passed through rather than settled, traveled via Archer Road, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and the Chicago and Alton Railroad. William B. Archer, the canal commissioner and namesake of Archer Avenue, bought 240 acres near present-day Harlem and Archer in 1835, and former mayor John Wentworth purchased tracts to the east in 1853, on land that a neighborhood park now honors. The soggy prairie saw limited farming, with some of the earliest permanent settlers being Dutch market gardeners. Chicago annexed the area in pieces in 1889, 1915, and 1921, and the first intensive residential development took root in the northeast section known as Sleepy Hollow.

The neighborhood's growth accelerated in the 1920s, when its population jumped from 2,472 to 6,050, driven largely by Eastern European immigrants, especially Poles, drawn by industrial jobs nearby. Archer Avenue, with its streetcar line, became the community's commercial spine, and the 1926 opening of Chicago Municipal Airport, later renamed Midway in 1949, set the area's economic infrastructure in place. Even so, the western reaches kept a rural look into the 1930s, with dirt roads and grazing animals. After the Depression slowed things, the population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1950 and then more than tripled during the 1950s as single-family homes filled the western blocks, peaking at 42,998 in 1970. The later decline of Midway traffic in favor of O'Hare cost the area jobs and residents, and its makeup gradually shifted from predominantly Eastern European to substantially Hispanic.