Dentist in Beverly, Chicago

The neighborhood we actually practice in

Comfort Family Dental is not near Beverly. It is in Beverly — 2036 West 95th Street, on the commercial strip that has been the neighborhood's main artery for well over a century. The Chicago Fire Department engine house sits a few doors west at 1724 West 95th. The Beverly branch of the Chicago Public Library, which opened in 2009 and holds the largest Irish heritage collection in the city, is on the same street.

Officially the community area is called Beverly Hills, and it is number 72 of Chicago's 77. It sits roughly twelve miles southwest of the Loop, covering a little over three square miles bounded by 87th Street to the north and 107th to the south, with Western Avenue and the rail line marking most of the western edge and Vincennes and Beverly Avenues the eastern.

The only genuinely hilly part of Chicago

Beverly sits on the Blue Island Ridge, a glacial formation that was once an island in a much larger lake. It is the highest ground in the city — close to a hundred feet above the level of Lake Michigan — and it is the reason Longwood Drive has views that no other Chicago street does. That elevation is also why the neighborhood developed the way it did. When the Rock Island Railroad realigned its suburban tracks in 1889 and extended service north of 99th Street, the ridge became a desirable streetcar suburb, and the large lots and generous houses that went up then are still the housing stock today.

The area was sparsely settled until the late nineteenth century. It was incorporated as part of the Village of Washington Heights in 1874, and the section north of 95th Street was annexed by Chicago in 1890. Nobody is entirely certain where the name came from. One account credits Alice Helm French, a prominent resident married to the first director of the Art Institute, who is said to have suggested Beverly, Massachusetts. Another holds that the railroad simply named the station after the hilly ground. What is certain is that it has nothing to do with Beverly Hills, California, which took its own name almost two decades after the 91st Street station was christened.

A neighborhood of houses, and of long stays

Nearly four out of five homes in Beverly are single-family detached houses — against roughly a quarter citywide. The typical house has about seven and a half rooms where the citywide median is under five, and about 85 percent of occupied units are owner-occupied. Most of the housing was built before 1970, much of it before 1940.

That stability shows up in the age profile. The median age here is around 45, a full decade above the city's. It is also one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in Chicago, with one of the highest shares of Black residents among the city's white-majority community areas — a distinction Beverly has held for decades.

For a dental practice, all of that adds up to something specific: people here tend to stay. Families come back with a second child, then a third, then eventually with their own parents. A single-doctor practice suits that pattern in a way a rotating-associate model does not, because the person who placed your crown in 2019 is the person who checks it in 2029.

Architecture worth the detour

Beverly holds an unusual concentration of landmarked buildings for a residential neighborhood. The Givins Castle at 103rd and Longwood — built in 1886 and 1887 by Robert C. Givins, who modeled it on castles from his native Ireland — is the only building of its kind in Chicago and now houses the Beverly Unitarian Church. The Longwood Drive District, designated a Chicago Landmark in 1981, runs a mixture of Italianate, Queen Anne, Shingle, Prairie School and Renaissance Revival houses along the top of the ridge.

There are two Frank Lloyd Wright American System-Built Homes on South Hoyne Avenue from 1917, and the Prairie-style William and Jessie M. Adams House at 9326 South Pleasant, built at the turn of the last century. The Walter Burley Griffin Place District covers homes built between 1909 and 1914. And the train stations themselves are landmarked: four of the six in the Beverly/Morgan Park Railroad District sit within Beverly, and they are rare surviving examples of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century station architecture in Chicago.

Getting to us

Metra's Rock Island District line runs five stations through Beverly — 91st, 95th, 99th, 103rd and 107th — stopping roughly every four blocks, which is unusually dense for the system. All are Zone C. If you take the 95th Street station you are a short walk from our door.

CTA bus routes 95, 103 and 112 run full-time through the area, with the 9 running part-time and Pace routes 349 and 381 adding suburban connections. The Red Line terminal at 95th/Dan Ryan connects by bus. That said, most Beverly households have two cars and most residents drive, so street parking outside the office is what most of our patients use — and it is generally available.

Schools, parks and the rest of it

The public elementary schools here are Sutherland, Barnard and Kellogg, plus Vanderpoel Magnet. Three Catholic elementary schools — St. Barnabas, St. John Fisher and Christ the King — serve the neighborhood as well, and it remains common for people to identify themselves by parish. We see children from all of them, and we are used to scheduling siblings back to back.

Beverly has nine parks, several of which predate the 1934 consolidation that created the Chicago Park District. Ridge Park, established in 1908, is the largest of the older ones at ten acres, with a 1913 fieldhouse that holds an indoor pool and the Vanderpoel Memorial Art Gallery and its collection of roughly 500 works. Beverly Park runs to more than thirteen acres. Ridge Wetlands Park exists because the neighborhood bought the land from Metra in 1991 specifically to stop it being paved for parking.

Neighborhood history, demographic and transit details on this page are drawn from the Wikipedia article on Beverly, available under CC BY-SA.