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Chicago Neighborhoods > West Pullman, Riverdale

West Pullman, Riverdale

Both West Pullman and adjacent Riverdale grew out of the late 19th century railroad/industry boom as blue collar workers flocked to the area. Today, green innovations such as solar farms have begun transforming West Pullman’s former industrial character. Riverdale is also a mostly residential neighborhood today, one dominated by one of the nation’s first housing projects, Altgeld Gardens, built in 1945 for returning war veterans.

Living History

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

For a neighborhood whose history is largely industrial, West Pullman, for visitors, is much more than a factory zone.

People live here and have since the community was established around a railroad junction in the middle 1800s. It grew as workers needed housing near the places they worked -- International Harvester, paint companies, even employees of George Pullman's railroad car factory who didn't want to live in George Pullman's pretty little company town just north and east of here.

Today, most of the factories are gone. The houses remain, however -- a mix of bungalows and frame houses -- and, if they could speak, they would tell their own stories.

Foremost of the districts was Stewart Ridge, the bosses' neighborhood where the fancy homes were, primarily on streets named for Harvard, Yale and Princeton and a few blocks either side of 120th Street. Some of these homes, dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s and a few needing a little work, resemble the grand houses in the Beverly neighborhood's landmark Ridge Historic District. One resembles nothing else in either community.

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West Pullman, Riverdale continued...

The Foster House and Stable (1900) at 121st Street and Harvard Avenue, a Frank Lloyd Wright design that reflects the beginnings of his fascination with Japanese architectural elements. It's also a reminder that the neighborhood, back then, was on the edge of the city and surrounded by prairie suitable for taking the family horse out for a gallop. (Alert visitors will enjoy the somewhat humbler house at 123rd Street and Princeton Avenue painted to resemble the Wright.)

Not far from Stewart Ridge is West Pullman Park, which, along with the usual ball fields, tennis courts and picnic areas, boasts a restored oak savannah, integrating the long-established oak trees with replanted native species to recreate what was here before we were.

The ecological theme of a visit to this community can extend to a 39-acre parcel around the 1000 block of 120th Street. Formerly the home of International Harvester's West Pullman Works and a paint factory, it recently was cleared of remaining factory structures - some of which left a residue of contamination - and is being redeveloped as a solar energy facility by Chicago-based Exelon and SunPower, a California energy company. The pilot project, when complete, will be the largest solar power plant in the country, capable of providing electricity for as many as 1,500 homes.

Just a couple of blocks east of this ambitious project, in the West Pullman Branch of the Chicago Public Library on 119th Street, is a display of more human proportions: a permanent (if modest) exhibit on labor and civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph. One of his early triumphs was organizing Pullman's sleeping-car porters; later, he was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington that featured Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Most young kids are familiar with Martin Luther King and the 'I Have a Dream' speech," says Dewana Dorsey, the branch's manager. "For young people to realize, 'Oh, there was somebody before him?' . . . "

Some artifacts are on loan from the A. Phillip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, north of the Pullman Historic District in Pullman.

Dining within the community is limited. There are some franchise restaurants (including a Chili's) clustered in the Marshfield Plaza mall on 119th Street, on the Morgan Park side of Interstate Hwy. 57 west of West Pullman. And Olivia's Sea of Soul Food offers a range of mains and sides at 12746 S. Halsted St. But the Morgan Park/ Beverly neighborhoods, straight west, offer plenty of options.

Riverdale, like neighboring West Pullman, was industrial. Most of that is gone. Today's prime features are a well-camouflaged sewage treatment plant, Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve and, more than anything, the sprawling Altgeld Gardens.

On land that once was a stop on the Underground Railroad, this public housing development covering 190 acres was built in 1945 specifically for returning African American veterans of World War II and their families, with schools, stores and parks.

When whole, its 1,500 low-rise units can house a population of 3,500. Restoration is ongoing.

President Barack Obama was a community organizer in Altgeld Gardens.

"Most children," the future president wrote in his autobiography, "Dreams of My Father," "grew up without ever having seen a garden."

Among the children who grew up here are three former NBA all-stars - Terry Cummings, Tim Hardaway and Cazzie Russell.

Russell, who, as a New York Knick, would star in a different kind of garden called Madison Square. He comes back, to Altgeld.

For more information about West Pullman, Riverdale, contact the Chicago Park District at 312.747.7090.