• Bohemian National Cemetery
• North Park University's Old Main Building
• Chicago's Only Waterfall at the North Shore Channel
• LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve

North Park takes its name from North Park University, whose Old Main building rose in 1894 along Foster Avenue on the north bank of the Chicago River's North Branch. The surrounding land was platted decades earlier, in 1855, as a village within Jefferson Township, when German and Swedish farmers began cultivating vegetable fields along the riverbank. The university's Swedish founders anchored the neighborhood's identity, and gradual development through the early twentieth century filled in what had long been agricultural land.

The Bohemian National Cemetery, opened in 1877, remains one of the neighborhood's most enduring landmarks, drawing Czech families to its northwestern corner and preserving that heritage in stone to this day. Nearby, the confluence of the river's North Branch and the North Shore Channel produces Chicago's only waterfall, a modest four-foot drop marking the neighborhood's eastern edge. LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve extends this natural corridor along the channel, protecting acres of woodland within the city limits.

From the university grounds of Old Main to the quiet trails of LaBagh Woods, North Park's landscape has shaped a neighborhood defined as much by nature as by academics — a history worth wearing, whether you walk its campus or its woods.