Oakland Playlot Park
History
Oakland Park takes its name from the surrounding near south side community. The area began as Cleaverville, a company town established in 1851 by industrialist Charles Cleaver. Twenty years later, real estate developers resubdivided the area, and named it Oakland. Though it quickly gained a reputation as a fashionable residential neighborhood, Oakland's character began to change as early as 1900. Working people moved in, and large homes became multi-family dwellings. New apartment buildings followed. By 1906, a piece of city property on Pershing Road in Oakland, originally intended for use as a pumping station, had been transferred to the Special Park Commission. By 1907, the commission had transformed the three-quarter-acre "eyesore" into "a pretty little park" that had "walks bordered with settees" and a drinking fountain. The city's Bureau of Parks and Recreation continued to maintain the park as a greenspace in the following decades, and neighborhood children planted a victory garden there during World War II.
The population of the surrounding Oakland community increased by 70% between 1940 and 1950, with the arrival of many new African-American residents. In 1959, the Chicago Park District began leasing the Oakland Park property from the city. During the 1960s, the park district installed playground equipment to serve the needs of area children, whose numbers increased with the 1969 construction of the Abraham Lincoln Housing Authority Community Center Apartments only a block away. The playground area was thoroughly rehabilitated in 1988.