 historic townhouses in Washington Park Washington Park refers to a neighborhood and a park on the South Side of Chicago.
Washington Park is a 380 acre (1.5 km²) park between Cottage Grove Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, (formerly known as "South Park"). Laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1870s, interesting sights are the DuSable Museum of African American History and its sculpture garden, the Lorado Taft sculpture Fountain of Time, and an architecturally distinctive National Guard regiment. Washington Park is a social center of the South Side and hosts many festivals in the summer, including Chicago's best organized cricket league. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas drives the drunken Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton around Washington Park, as the two embrace.
Washington Park is part of Chicago's boulevard system. From Washington Park, one can take the Midway east to Jackson Park, Garfield Boulevard west to Midway Airport, or Drexel Boulevard north to the central city.
The neighborhood of Washington Park is west of the park itself, stretching east-west from Cottage Grove to Wentworth Avenue, and north-south from 63rd Street to 51st. Half of the neighborhood's lots are vacant, reflecting the fact that Washington Park is one of the poorest in Chicago, with a median household income of only $15,000 a year. The area rapidly changed from white to African-American in the 1920s. The Studs Lonigan trilogy is set here.
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