• Clarendon Park Fieldhouse (1916)
• Garfield-Clarendon Model Railroad Club
• Kuumba Lynx
• Montrose Beach

Clarendon Park takes its name from the avenue running alongside it, itself honoring Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, an English statesman who died in 1674. The park began in 1916 as the Clarendon Municipal Bathing Beach, a state-of-the-art facility built by the city's Special Park Commission as proof that Chicago could reclaim its lakefront "for the people" — nearly half a million visitors came in its first season alone.

That lakefront access didn't last. When Lincoln Park was extended north to Foster Avenue in the 1930s, Clarendon's beach was filled in and the site left landlocked; rather than close, the old bathing house was reborn as a community center, taken over by the Chicago Park District in 1957. Today its fieldhouse hosts the Garfield-Clarendon Model Railroad Club and Kuumba Lynx, a longtime youth hip-hop arts organization, while Montrose Beach still carries the neighborhood's lakefront tradition a few blocks north.

MY-NHD's Clarendon Park collection is built the same way this neighborhood was: repurposed, resourceful, and still finding new ways to bring people together.