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Marquette Park, Gage Park

The neighborhoods of Marquette Park and Gage Park are both anchored by namesake public parks. Officially designated as Chicago Lawn, the Marquette Park neighborhood was once a hotbed of civil rights unrest in the 1960’s, and is now a diverse residential community with plenty of green space. Many area restaurants and businesses still bear the influence of the neighborhood’s former position at the heart of Chicago’s Lithuanian community. Gage Park, a predominantly residential neighborhood to the north, is home to many Eastern Europeans, Irish Catholics and Hispanics.

Marquette Park, Gage Park: One of Chicago's Most Diverse Communities

Written by Alan Solomon, with research assistance from the Chicago Neighborhood Tourism Project.

For generations, this was a neighborhood where, in many homes, English was a second language. First language: Lithuanian. It remains a neighborhood where, in many homes, English is a second language. First language: Spanish.

In restaurant kitchens, though, the languages are all over the world map.

Marquette Park is today among the city's most diverse neighborhoods. And, while it takes some exploration to fully appreciate that diversity, it takes no work at all to discover the land mass that dominates this community.

Marquette Park – the actual park – is the largest of the southwest side parks. It's a 600-acre sprawl of green real estate, beautifully maintained, that includes soccer and baseball fields, a 9-hole golf course and a bridge and lagoon that made a splash: Remember when Jake and Elwood forced Nazi demonstrators off a bridge into a lagoon in "The Blues Brothers" movie? That lagoon was in Marquette Park.

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Public Transportation:

Bus: 52, 63, 67. For more travel information, visit www.transitchicago.com.

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Community Resources

City of Chicago: Marquette Park Lagoon and Prairie Map

The Historic Chicago Bungalow Association Brochure

Neighborhood Map

Print Map and Guide

Unless otherwise noted, each site on this map has identified itself as wheelchair accessible.

Marquette Park, Gage Park continued...

The park is particularly inviting on warm-weather Sundays, filled with soccer games and adjacent family picnics.

While Marquette Park/Gage Park has been a neighborhood in transition for 40-plus years, its commercial streets – 63rd Street and Kedzie and Western Avenues – have retained vitality. The food-oriented businesses largely reflect the area's large Mexican community. No shortage of taquerias, carnicerias, panaderias and paleterias here – and don't miss the Kedzie Avenue tamale stands (Manolo's and Tamales Rosa).

But then there are surprises.

The Nile Restaurant, on 63rd Street near Central Park Avenue, is a small, tidy diner specializing in Middle Eastern appetizers and salads and a variety of kebabs.

Fat Johnnies, on Western, has been handing hot dogs through the window of this nondescript shack since 1972. Its "mother-in-law sandwich" – a tamale on a hot dog, all covered with chili and cheese – is mainly for the brave of stomach, but its Chicago dogs are up to standard.

There's Garifuna Flava, just west of Western on 63rd. This restaurant serves the cuisine of the Garifuna tribe, descendants of escaped West African slaves who mixed with the locals and eventually settled in Honduras and Belize. The food – strong on seafood and plantains and more esoteric ingredients – merges elements of the Caribbean and Africa. This is special.

And on 71st Street: Seklycia, a small restaurant, a remnant of a time when this neighborhood was the Midwest center of all things Lithuanian-American. Another: the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on Lithuanian Plaza Court (69th Street) just steps from the park. Completed in 1957, from the outside it looks like a modernist's version of a church in Vilnius; inside, it is a wonder.

Twelve blocks west of the church, on Pulaski Road in the West Lawn neighborhood, the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture.

And now, a little history.

In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose movement since the 1950s had targeted segregation in the South, turned his attention northward. Chicago's Marquette Park was where King brought his marchers.

On Aug. 5, King's motorcade arrived in the neighborhood, greeted by jeering counterdemonstrators. A stone hit his head and he dropped to one knee. More bottles and rocks followed; there would be 30 injuries reported and 40 arrests.

There is no plaque where Dr. King fell. And this is a very different community today than it was in 1966.

Not far from that spot, on 63rd Street, new owners had taken over a place now called Restaurant Carnitas y Birrieria Jalisco and on a Saturday afternoon a large family nearly filled it. There was laughter and celebration, digital cameras flashed, the jukebox blared and children giggled as children have been giggling in Marquette Park since the neighborhood's beginning

What the restaurant had been before, 40-plus years ago, didn't matter. What mattered: The puerco en salsa roja was wonderful . . .

For more information about Marquette Park/Gage Park, please contact the 63rd Street Growth Commission/Greater Southwest Development Corporation at 773.436.1000.