Dentist Near Mount Greenwood, Chicago

About Mount Greenwood

Mount Greenwood is community area 74, about fourteen miles southwest of the Loop, bounded by 103rd Street to the north, 117th to the south, Pulaski Road to the west and Sacramento Avenue to the east. It is bordered by Beverly and Morgan Park on the east, Evergreen Park to the north, Oak Lawn to the west, and Merrionette Park and Alsip to the south. Our office on 95th Street is a straightforward drive northeast.

It is one of the few Chicago community areas where residents, the city and academics all agree on where the boundaries actually are.

Farms, cemeteries and a surveyor's name

German and Dutch farmers settled the area in the mid-nineteenth century. The name dates to 1879, when the surveyor George Washington Waite platted an eighty-acre federal land grant he had received. Saloons proliferated in the years that followed, and when a movement grew to make the area dry — as neighboring Beverly and Morgan Park already were — a group of residents responded by successfully campaigning to incorporate Mount Greenwood as its own village instead.

Twenty years later, in 1927, the village voted to be annexed into Chicago in order to get better municipal services. The Depression delayed most of them; the WPA finally installed sewers in 1936, and residents were still pushing for curbs into the 1960s. The area kept the character of a blue-collar city-suburb regardless.

Mount Greenwood is ringed by cemeteries — enough that it was once nicknamed the Seven Holy Tombs. Mount Greenwood Cemetery itself, although entirely surrounded by Chicago, sits in unincorporated Cook County.

The last farm in Chicago

Peter Ouwenga farmed here until the mid-1980s, when he sold his land to the Chicago Public Schools. It was the last working farm in the city. The district built the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences on it — a magnet school teaching agricultural science to urban students, and only the second of its kind in the country after W.B. Saul in Philadelphia. It stands at 111th and Pulaski.

Who lives here

Mount Greenwood is home to a large number of Chicago firefighters, police officers and union workers, and a significant share of residents are City of Chicago employees. Public administration is the single largest employment sector at nearly 22 percent, followed by education at 16 percent and health care at 11 percent. It also has the fourth-highest share of self-reported Irish Americans of anywhere in the United States, at around 46 percent.

The homeownership rate is 87.5 percent, roughly double the citywide figure, and the median household income sits well above the city's. Most of the housing is single-family and was built between 1940 and 1970. Over 95 percent of residents have graduated high school.

What that means for us, in plain terms: we see a lot of shift workers. First-responder schedules do not line up neatly with standard office hours, so tell us what your rotation looks like when you call and we will find something that works.

Getting to us, and the 111th Street corridor

Nearly 90 percent of Mount Greenwood commuters drive, and the neighborhood's own commercial corridor runs along 111th Street, which has seen new development since a TIF district was created there in 2009. Getting to 95th Street is a short run northeast.

If you prefer transit, CTA routes 103, 112, 52A and 53A serve the neighborhood. The nearest Metra stations are on the Rock Island line — 103rd and 107th Street in Beverly, and 111th and 115th in Morgan Park.

Schools and parks

Three Catholic high schools are here: Brother Rice, Marist and Mother McAuley. Public grade schools include Mount Greenwood Elementary, George F. Cassell and the Annie Keller Regional Gifted Center, and the neighborhood is zoned to Morgan Park High School. Saint Xavier University moved to Mount Greenwood from the Douglas area in 1956. The Chicago Public Library branch here holds a significant Irish heritage collection.

Mount Greenwood Park was identified for development in the Park District's post-war ten-year plan; the district bought the 24-acre site along 111th Street in 1949, added a fieldhouse in 1966 and a swimming pool in 1973. It now includes a refrigerated ice rink and a playground themed around airports and train stations. The neighborhood has 2.8 acres of park land per thousand residents, above the citywide figure.

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