Homes for sale in
Washington Park.

Washington Park's defining feature, the park, was created as the western division of Chicago's ambitious South Park system. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux completed their plan for South Park in 1871, and the commissioners acquired the land over the following years. In 1881 the commissioners named the western division for George Washington and the eastern division Jackson Park, the two connected by the grand boulevard called the Midway Plaisance. Olmsted and Vaux's design centered on a vast pastoral meadow, and the firm of Burnham and Root later designed several park structures, including a 1910 administration building that today houses the DuSable Museum. In 1922 Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft completed the Fountain of Time on the park's southeastern edge.

The surrounding residential community developed in the late 19th century, first settled by Irish and German railroad workers and meatpackers, with affluent Chicagoans building mansions along wide boulevards such as Grand Boulevard, now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Drive. A turn-of-the-century housing boom coincided with the Great Migration, and the area rapidly transformed from European American to African American during the 1920s, a transition marked by the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. By 1930 the population was only about 8 percent white. The nearby Washington Park Subdivision became a focus of restrictive racial covenants documented in the landmark study Black Metropolis, and Lorraine Hansberry's family fight against such covenants in the area helped inspire her play A Raisin in the Sun.