As we kick off East Garfield Park Week at YoChicago, get up to speed on the neighborhood with a brief history at the Encyclopedia of Chicago site:
East Garfield Park was annexed to Chicago in 1869, but a quarter century elapsed before it was thickly populated. […] In 1966 Martin Luther King’s northern civil rights drive built antislum organizations. […] This promising spurt of activism was undermined by rioting along Madison Street in 1968. […] East Garfield Park lost more than two-thirds of its population to out-migration, from a high of 70,091 in 1950 to 20,881 in 2000. In the 1970s and 1980s, as endemic poverty and unemployment overtook the area, a drug economy and associated criminal activity such as prostitution filled the economic void.
All week, we’ll be showing you the neighborhood as it is today. Start with a video tour of the Garfield Park Conservatory and a flip through our Flickr album of East Garfield Park photos. If you want more background on the conservatory, which celebrates its centennial next year, check out the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance’s history of what has been called 4.5 acres of “landscape art under glass.”