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Local Landmarks & Heritage

  • Marquette Park (323-acre Olmsted Brothers-designed park, 1903)
  • Darius and Girėnas Memorial (1935 Art Deco monument)
  • Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial
  • Ashburn Prairie remnant

Neighborhood History

Marquette Park takes its name from the 323-acre park at its heart, itself named for Father Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary who explored the region in the 1670s. Laid out in 1903 as one of fourteen parks the Olmsted Brothers designed for the South Park Commission, the park anchored a district of bungalows and single-family homes built mainly in the 1920s, as Lithuanian, Polish, German, and Irish families gave the area its "white ethnic" identity — strong enough that by the 1940s locals called it the "Lithuanian Gold Coast."

The park's Darius and Girėnas Memorial, an Art Deco monument dedicated in 1935 before 40,000 people to honor two Lithuanian-American aviators lost on a transatlantic flight, still stands in its northeast corner. The Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial marks the site of the August 1966 march Dr. King led here to protest housing discrimination, a defining moment of the Chicago Freedom Movement. The park's Ashburn Prairie remnant, a rare surviving patch of pre-settlement prairie, endures at its southern edge.

From an Olmsted-designed park honoring a seventeenth-century missionary to the site of one of the civil rights era's hardest-fought marches, Marquette Park carries more layered history than its bungalow streets suggest. MY-NHD's collection carries that history forward.

MY-NHD

Marquette Park - Chicago - Unisex Cotton Tee

Marquette Park - Chicago - Unisex Cotton Tee

Regular price $29.95 CAD
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Marquette Park is named for its 323-acre park, honoring the French Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette and laid out by the Olmsted Brothers in 1903. Its 1935 Darius and Girėnas Memorial honors two Lithuanian-American aviators.

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