Lazarus Playlot Park (c/o Pottawattomie Park)
History
In 1976, the Chicago Park District purchased this once-vacant lot for development as a playlot, and improvements began in 1980. Six years later, the park district named the playlot Lazarus Park in honor of American poet and philanthropist Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). Born into a non-observant Jewish family, Lazarus gradually developed an active interest in Judaic issues, fueled by the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States in the early 1880s. She is best known for her poem "New Colossus," written in 1883, and inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty two decades later. Her widely-recognized lines read in part:
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
The Lazarus Park designation, made at the request of the Rogers Park Chapter of Emma Lazarus Jewish Women's Clubs, was deemed an appropriate commemoration of the Statue of Liberty's 100th anniversary in 1986.
