Landscape Information
Twelve miles south of the Loop, this 3,500-acre community was founded in 1879 by George M. Pullman, founder of the Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company. It was one of America’s first planned industrial towns and was solely owned by the Pullman Company.
In 1880 architect Solon S. Beman and landscape architect Nathan Franklin Barrett designed a self-sufficient community with a gridded street pattern. This included a railroad car factory, hotel, church, arcaded market hall, school, civic buildings, and worker housing, which ranged from detached Queen-Anne houses to brick row houses, apartments, and blockhouse tenements. Streets were lined with concrete sidewalks and generous lawn panels planted with deciduous canopy street trees. Other landscape embellishments included ornamental gardens foregrounding the Hotel Florence and both Pullman Park and Arcade Park. In 1894 the experimental community was deemed a failure when workers’ riots led to a nationwide railroad strike that required the intervention of federal troops; when Pullman himself died three years later, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to relinquish all non-industrial holdings. By 1909 all the residential properties were privately owned, and the two public parks were acquired by the City of Chicago.
Over the next half century, railroad restructuring led to job loss and the neighborhood gradually declined. By the 1960s, with increased suburbanization, the community was threatened with demolition. By 1970, the creation of the Pullman Civic Association renewed the site’s visibility, and the 300-acre district was designated as a National Historic Landmark.
In 1993 a visitor center was established, and two years later the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum opened in a brick rowhouse, honoring Randolph, a civil rights leader, and African American contributions to America's labor movement. Site Design Group rehabilitated approximately thirteen acres surrounding the visitor center complex in 2023. The Pullman National Monument was established in 2015, and seven years later legislation altered the designation, renaming it Pullman National Historical Park.
