History
When New Yorker Martin Kimbell claimed possession of 160 acres of open prairie that would become Logan Square in 1836, it was beyond Chicago’s bounds. Other colonists soon followed Kimbell in what was becoming the township of Jefferson. Farmers in Logan Square and beyond could transport their harvest to markets along the North West Plank Road (later Milwaukee Avenue), which followed the line of an Indian track bending northwest out of Chicago, beginning in 1850. The Chicago & North Western Railway built its tracks just west of the river a few years later. Industries quickly followed suit. Chicago seized the land east of Western Avenue and south of Fullerton in 1863. (Because of its large number of German factory employees, this neighborhood—now Bucktown—was known as Holstein.) Six years later, the city annexed the territory to the north (east of Western, between Fullerton and the river).
Following the 1871 fire, Logan Square developed at a faster rate. Because the location was outside Chicago’s fire limits, reasonably priced frame houses sprung up quickly. German and Scandinavian immigrants progressively relocated northwestward after the Milwaukee Avenue street railway line was extended to Armitage and Belmont. Maplewood had a population of 6,000 people by 1884.
In 1889, the city of Chicago annexed the remaining area of Logan Square. The “L” came the following year, and new residences encircled the Fullerton and Milwaukee Avenue stations immediately. The city soon paved and established the boulevard system that the West Park Commission had designed years before. Upwardly moving Scandinavians and Germans soon lined Logan, Kedzie, Humboldt Boulevards, and Logan and Palmer Squares with sturdy graystone two- and three-flats and substantial single-family residences.
Logan Square flourished the most after World War I. Poles and Russian Jews arrived to take their position when the earlier-arriving population migrated further along Milwaukee Avenue. Rental housing and flat construction remained unabated. The Logan Square Ball Park at Milwaukee and Sawyer, the last large piece of undeveloped land, was taken by developers in 1925.
After 1930, the population began to decline progressively. On the district’s industrial eastern edge, older frame homes are degraded. The Northwest (Kennedy) Expressway development in the late 1950s effectively cut this district off from the rest of Logan Square, pushing many to leave. In the coming decade, the installation of the Dearborn/Milwaukee subway (now the Blue Line) impacted commercial life in downtown Logan Square.
Logan Square experienced the beginnings of a renaissance in the early 1960s that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Residents of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association created the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in 1963, and it has fought to enhance housing and civic engagement ever since. Young urban entrepreneurs bought and refurbished many of the excellent houses along the boulevards in the following decades, leading to the corridor’s designation as a National Register district in the 1980s.
Logan Square now has a significant ethnic and economic variety. Its population has declined slower than Chicago’s overall, mainly to an inflow of Hispanics since 1960. While upper-middle-class individuals own the sturdy mansions along the boulevards and new and refurbished townhouses in gentrifying Bucktown, most of Logan Square’s residents still live in the neighborhood’s rental flats and apartments.
