Homes for sale in
Norwood Park.

The first inhabitant of European descent in the area was Mark Noble, an English immigrant who arrived in 1833 and built the farmhouse that still stands today as the oldest building within Chicago city limits. English farmers dominated the 1830s and were later joined by Germans and, to a lesser extent, Poles and Scandinavians. The area's growth accelerated after 1853, when the Illinois and Wisconsin Railroad, later the Chicago and North Western Railway and now Metra's Union Pacific Northwest Line, laid tracks through the area. In 1868 the Norwood Land and Building Association formed and purchased the land, and it laid out Old Norwood with its distinctive curving, diagonal streets rather than a standard grid. The community took its name from Henry Ward Beecher's 1868 novel Norwood, or Village Life in New England, with Park added to distinguish it from another Illinois post office.

Norwood Park was organized as a township in 1873, incorporated as a village in 1874, and annexed to Chicago on November 7, 1893. Upon incorporation the village banned the sale of alcohol, and dry precincts persisted for well over a century, with the first liquor store in 50 years opening only in 2016. During the 1920s major roads including Foster, Milwaukee, Devon, Northwest Highway, and Harlem Avenues were improved, and the fieldhouse at Norwood Park was built in 1928. The neighborhood added roughly 2,000 residents between 1930 and 1940 despite the Great Depression, and although the Kennedy Expressway was built nearby in the 1950s, the historic buildings of Old Norwood were left intact. The City of Chicago recognized the Norwood Park Historical District in 1986 and designated the Noble-Seymour-Crippen House a Chicago Landmark in 1988.