Austin & Garfield Park

Austin and Garfield Park are West Side neighborhoods with some of the grandest housing in the city and some of the longest disinvestment. Austin is Chicago’s largest community area by population, a former suburb annexed in 1899 with brick mansions in the Austin Village district and a main street on Chicago Avenue. Garfield Park, to the east, is named for the 184-acre park with the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the largest conservatories in the country, and its boulevards carry greystones built for the wealthy in the 1890s. Community groups and the city’s Invest South/West program have poured money into both in recent years, and Austin’s Soul City Corridor on Chicago Avenue is the visible result.

Where it is

Austin runs from North Avenue south to Roosevelt and from Cicero west to Austin Boulevard, the Oak Park line; Garfield Park sits east of it between Kinzie and the Eisenhower, split into East and West by the park. The Green Line runs along Lake Street with stops at Cicero, Laramie, Central and Austin, plus Conservatory-Central Park Drive, Kedzie and California in Garfield Park; the Blue Line’s Forest Park branch runs down the Eisenhower with stops at Cicero, Pulaski and Kedzie. The 66 Chicago and 20 Madison buses run all day, and the Eisenhower’s Austin, Central and Cicero exits serve drivers. The Loop is 20 to 25 minutes by train.

What to know if you’re moving here

The houses are big and cheap by city standards, and the blocks vary a great deal.

• Housing is greystones, two-flats and brick bungalows built from the 1890s to the 1950s, with typical prices of roughly $100,000 to $400,000 as a broad editorial estimate as of September 2026.
• Street parking is easy almost everywhere, and permit zones are rare.
• Public schools fall under Chicago Public Schools, with Austin College and Career Academy and Michele Clark among the high schools.
• The Green and Blue lines both serve the area, so a car is optional for a downtown commute.
• The Austin Village and Midway Park historic districts have landmark protections on some of the mansion blocks.
• The drawback is that commercial corridors have long stretches of vacancy, and grocery and retail options are thinner than the housing deserves.

What to do if you’re visiting

The Conservatory is the destination, the Green Line drops you at its door, and Madison Street and Chicago Avenue in Austin have the places to eat afterward.

• The Garfield Park Conservatory at 300 N. Central Park Ave. is free, open year-round and has its own Green Line stop, and the park’s 1928 Gold Dome field house is a city landmark.
• Madison Street in Austin has two of the West Side’s oldest kitchens: the cafeteria line at MacArthur’s Restaurant, open since 1997, and the sauce-tossed chicken at Uncle Remus Saucy Fried Chicken, at Central and Madison since 1969.
• The Soul City Corridor’s grocery store is Forty Acres Fresh Market at 5713 W. Chicago Ave., which opened in September 2025 with a butcher counter and a hot bar.
• Coffee on Lake Street means New Sound Cafe, a 1970s gospel record shop restored as a two-level cafe near the Oak Park line, where all profits go to West Side nonprofits.
• Concerts, opera and dance play the 850-seat Kehrein Center for the Arts on Washington Boulevard, a restored mid-century school auditorium that reopened in 2019.
• In East Garfield Park, Unison Coffee opened in April 2026 inside BandWith Chicago’s new arts center at 152 S. California Ave., with a patio and a $1 drip coffee happy hour before 10 a.m.