• Gage Park Fieldhouse (1928, Tom Lea mural)
• Site of former Central Steel and Wire Co.
• Western/Kedzie streetcar corridor
• St. Turibius/St. Simon parish churches

Gage Park takes its name from George W. Gage, a South Park Commissioner who began planning a park at the intersection of Western Avenue and Garfield Boulevard in 1873. When Gage died just two years later, the commission named the unfinished park in his honor. The surrounding farmland, settled by German families in the 1840s, became part of the Town of Lake in 1865 and joined Chicago with the rest of that township in 1889.

Growth stayed slow until the electric trolley reached Western and Kedzie between 1900 and 1910, sparking a building boom that drew Bohemian, Polish, and Lithuanian families to work at the nearby Union Stock Yards. Gage Park's own fieldhouse, a classical building petitioned for by residents, finally opened in 1928, its auditorium still home to a 1931 mural by artist Tom Lea. Central Steel and Wire Company, Royal Crown Bottling, and World's Finest Chocolate all built plants here in the decades that followed, giving generations of residents steady work close to home.

MY-NHD's Gage Park collection is built for a neighborhood shaped by the people who kept petitioning, kept building, and kept showing up, generation after generation.