Dentist Near Evergreen Park, IL

About Evergreen Park

Evergreen Park is a village of just under twenty thousand people in Worth Township, Cook County, surrounded by Chicago on three sides with Oak Lawn and Hometown to the west. Ashburn lies to its north, Beverly to its east, and Beverly and Mount Greenwood to its south. It covers a little over three square miles, uses the 60805 ZIP code and the 708 area code, and sits about seventeen miles southwest of the Loop.

Crucially for our patients: 95th Street runs straight through it. Our office is a direct drive east along that one road.

Why it is a village and not a neighborhood

A German farming family had settled the area by 1828, with more German settlers following over the following decades. Kedzie Avenue and 95th Street crossed the farmland and provided the route to market. The first railroad — later part of the Grand Trunk — came through in 1873, and the community built its first school in 1875 just west of 95th and Kedzie. Stores clustered around that intersection and it became the business district.

The name comes from a park. A developer, inspired by the area around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, laid out a star-shaped park with eight streets radiating from it and planted evergreen trees there. The park was intended to be the town center, though 95th and Kedzie turned out to be the truer midpoint. It was renamed Klein Park in 1968 in honour of Mayor Henry Klein, who died shortly after the village's seventy-fifth anniversary.

During the financial panic of the 1890s, several neighboring communities voted to be annexed by Chicago. Evergreen Park, recognizing the strength of its own business district and wanting to avoid annexation, incorporated instead — on 20 December 1893, by a vote of 41 of the 50 residents who turned out. That decision is the reason it remains a separate municipality today.

A medical history most people do not know

Little Company of Mary Hospital opened at 95th Street and California Avenue in 1930; 232 babies were born there in its first year. Twenty years later, on 17 June 1950, it was the site of the world's first successful kidney transplant. Dr. Richard H. Lawler, a surgeon at Cook County Hospital, led the team. The recipient, Ruth Tucker, was forty-four and had terminal polycystic kidney disease; she lived another five years.

The operation was considered hazardous and highly controversial. Lawler was repudiated by many colleagues and opposed by the Catholic Church. By the 1970s, with transplantation established as routine life-saving medicine, he and his team were recognized for it. He retired in 1979 and died in 1982.

The Plaza, and what replaced it

Evergreen Plaza opened at 95th and Western in 1952. Developed by Arthur Rubloff, it was enclosed — making it the first indoor shopping mall in the Chicago area. It eventually ran to roughly 1.2 million square feet across two stories and was drawing about seven million visitors a year by 2006. After sixty-one years it closed in 2013, and Evergreen Marketplace opened on the site in 2018.

Evergreen Park is also known as the Village of Churches, for the thirteen congregations established within its small footprint. The village's peak population came in the 1970 census at 25,921. An F4 tornado passed through during the outbreak of 21 April 1967.

Coming to us from Evergreen Park

The drive is about as simple as it gets: east on 95th Street. Pace and CTA both provide bus service on routes connecting Evergreen Park across the Southland, and the 95 bus runs the corridor.

Evergreen Park families are served by District 124 — Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest Elementary, plus Central Middle School — and Evergreen Park Community High School. Most Holy Redeemer and Queen of Martyrs serve Catholic families, and Brother Rice, Mother McAuley and St. Rita are all close by across the city line. We see students from all of them.

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