Pickles, Bungalows, and the Unfinished Symphony of Lincoln Square
Lincoln Square is a neighborhood where the ghosts of celery kings and immigrant dreamers linger between the bike lanes and bakeries. In the city’s north, where pickle brine once perfumed the air and the clang of the Ravenswood El signaled new beginnings, Chicago’s restless spirit finds a home - always changing, always arguing with its own past.
If you want to understand a city, don’t ask about its tallest building or its latest restaurant opening. Ask about the places that don’t quite fit, the neighborhoods that have been renamed, repaved, and reimagined so many times that their stories get tangled in the roots of the trees lining their streets. Lincoln Square is one of those places - a patchwork of celery fields, pickle brine, and immigrant ambition, stitched together by the stubborn optimism that defines Chicago itself.
You could start the story with Conrad Sulzer, a Swiss immigrant who, in 1836, bought a chunk of land near Montrose and Clark. Sulzer was a truck farmer, one of many who’d steer their wagons down the old Little Fort Road (now Lincoln Avenue), celery and pickles in tow, to feed a city hungry for the taste of something fresh. By the late 1800s, the Budlong brothers had turned a tidy profit on pickles and flowers, their greenhouses drawing in Polish workers from across the city. The area’s claim to fame? For a while, it was the celery capital of the nation. Try explaining that to someone who thinks Chicago is all deep dish and hot dogs.
But Lincoln Square has always been more than what it grows. Bowmanville, one of the area’s first subdivisions, was founded by a hotel keeper with a knack for selling land he didn’t own - a fitting origin story for a neighborhood that’s been reinventing itself ever since. The arrival of Rosehill Cemetery in 1859 brought mourners and picnickers, their Sunday best trailing dust along the railroad tracks, and soon the Ravenswood subdivision followed, promising exclusivity and easy commutes for those who could afford it.
The city crept north, streetcars rattled through, and the farmland gave way to bungalows and two-flats. The names - Ravenswood Gardens, Ravenswood Manor - hinted at a genteel past, but the present was always messier. After World War II, as empty storefronts multiplied and the neighborhood’s identity seemed up for grabs, local merchants tried to conjure a sense of place. They put up a statue of Abraham Lincoln in 1956, built a pedestrian mall in 1978, and imported a lantern from Hamburg, Germany, hoping to evoke an Old World charm that might lure shoppers back to the square1.
But Lincoln Square’s real story isn’t in its statues or marketing campaigns. It’s in the people who arrived when others left: Greeks displaced from the old Greektown by the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway, Latinos and Asians drawn by affordable homes and the promise of community. Each wave brought new businesses, new churches, new arguments about what the neighborhood should be.
On the corner of Foster and Lincoln, where heavy development now hums, you can still hear echoes of Bowmanville’s old town center. The Budlong Pickle farm is long gone, replaced by residential streets and the diverse enclave of Budlong Woods, but the memory lingers - in the names, in the stories passed down by families from Greece, Colombia, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Balkans, historic Assyria, and the Middle East. Today, Lincoln Square is a mosaic of restaurants, shops, and cafes, shaped by the ambitions of those who arrived with little more than hope and a willingness to work.
The neighborhood is still changing. Streetscape improvement plans, bike lanes, and traffic calming measures signal the city’s latest attempt to shape the future. But Lincoln Square resists easy definition. It is, and always has been, a place for the lost and found - a neighborhood that absorbs newcomers, arguments, and ambitions, and turns them into something uniquely Chicagoan1.
In the end, Lincoln Square’s story isn’t finished. It’s a work in progress, a neighborhood that refuses to settle for nostalgia or novelty. Lincoln Square is still writing its own story, one immigrant, one storefront, one argument at a time. And that, in this city of reinvention, is as good as it gets.
