Douglass Park Cultural and Community Center
1401 S Sacramento Dr (North Lawndale)
Part of the Boulevard system, this park was established in 1869 as South Park. Two years later, the park officially opened, named for U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas. In 2020, the park was renamed Douglass (Frederick and Anna) Park, for abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his wife Anna Murray Douglass. Designer William Le Baron Jenney initially completed plans for the West Park System, which included Douglas, as well as Garfield and Humboldt parks. In 1905, famed landscape architect Jens Jensen, in his role as the West Park System’s General Superintendent and Chief Landscape Architect, added a semi-circular entryway at Marshall Boulevard and a formal garden at the corner of Ogden Avenue and Sacramento Drive. The entrance to the garden features Flower Hall (a massive garden shelter) and a reflecting pool. The park today includes an outdoor swimming pool, a miniature golf course, soccer fields and basketball courts, a running track, and its original lagoon, replete with the Jenney-designed stone bridge.
“World Play Way” is a mural on the sidewalk on the corner of California and Ogden avenues, for which Roger Reeves, a former resident of Lawndale, was commissioned to write a poem. Words of hope, strength and positivity culled from his book, Children Listen, are highlighted in a kind of public word search. Riot Fest, a three-day punk, hip-hop and alternative music festival, took place here between 2015-2024.
Stuart Dybek, one of the best short story writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, features Douglas Park in several award-winning pieces. In addition to "Hot Ice," Dybek references Douglas(s) Park in "Blight," where the white protagonists sing on one side of a viaduct and Black characters sing on the other side. The story, written in the 1980s but set during the Vietnam War era, takes its title from the mayor’s declaration that the neighborhood in which the boys live—have always lived—is considered nearly uninhabitable. The unnamed street resembles the California viaduct just south of 19th Street, to the east of the park. That paragraph shows one of the main themes of Dybek’s work--how borders and boundaries and liminal space can be places for transcendent experience.
