Dentist in Morgan Park, Chicago

About Morgan Park

Morgan Park is community area 75, running south from 107th Street — where it meets Beverly — down to 119th Street at the city limit, with Halsted and Ashland to the east and California roughly marking the west. It shares its ZIP codes with Beverly, which is a fair reflection of how closely the two neighborhoods function in practice. Our office on 95th Street is a short drive north.

How it got here

The area was settled in the mid-nineteenth century and was originally called North Blue Island, both because of its position on the Blue Island Ridge and its proximity to the older settlement of Blue Island to the south. Thomas Morgan, born in Surrey and arrived in the United States in 1843, became the area's largest landholder when he bought the ground between what are now 91st and 119th Streets and Western Avenue and Vincennes. He cleared trees and ran cattle and sheep on it for the next quarter century.

In 1869 Morgan's family sold three thousand acres to the Blue Island Land and Building Company, which laid out streets, planted thousands of trees and put up houses. The company's stated aim was to build a community free of the smoke and nuisance that were making the city increasingly hard to live in. Its president and treasurer were both Rock Island Railroad executives, and they used that position to get a rail spur built to serve the new development almost immediately.

When the modern Suburban Line was completed in 1889, Morgan Park received three passenger depots — at 107th, 111th and 115th Streets. The 111th Street station, an elaborate Queen Anne structure designed by John T. Long, still stands just east of Bohn Park.

A dry village, still

Morgan Park incorporated as a village in 1882 and, because of its strong Baptist and educational associations, prohibited the sale of alcohol east of Western Avenue. That ban has never been lifted. The village became a Chicago neighborhood when it was annexed in 1914.

There was a serious effort, largely by the Blue Island Land and Building Company, to make Morgan Park a center of learning. It succeeded in part: Morgan Park Academy arrived in 1873, the Chicago Female College in 1875, and the Baptist Union Theological Seminary relocated here in 1877. There was even a push in 1888 to bring the new University of Chicago to the neighborhood, which failed when John D. Rockefeller preferred the larger Hyde Park site donated by Marshall Field. Morgan Park Academy still operates today.

The neighborhood now

Morgan Park is largely an upper-middle-class community, with housing to match and a handful of estate-scale houses along the ridge on Longwood Drive. Buildings here were designed by a genuinely notable roster of architects including Dwight Perkins, Dankmar Adler, Normand Patton and Harry H. Waterman. The Beverly Arts Center is here. So is the home of Paul P. Harris, the founder of Rotary International, at 10856 South Longwood Drive — preserved as a memorial and still visited by Rotarians from around the world.

As of 2013 the community was about 55 percent Black and 37 percent white, making it at that point the Black-majority Chicago community area with the highest share of white residents. It is served by the Beverly branch of the Metra Rock Island line.

Schools and families

Chicago Public Schools operates Morgan Park High School — home of the Mustangs, whose rivalry with Simeon is among the fiercest in the city — along with Clissold and Esmond, the latter housed in one of the oldest school buildings in the district, built in the 1890s. Zoned K–8 schools include Clissold, Esmond, Shoop, Mount Vernon, Higgins and Haley. St. Cajetan and St. Walter serve Catholic families.

The neighborhood has produced Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space; Ayo Dosunmu of the Chicago Bulls, who came up through Morgan Park High; Peter Cetera of the band Chicago; and Emil Jones, longtime president of the Illinois Senate.

Practically speaking, Morgan Park families come to us for the same reason Beverly families do: one office that handles children, adults and seniors, with implants and gum treatment done in-house rather than referred across the city.

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