Throop (Amos Gager) Park

Throop Park is one of many small City parks created to meet the growing recreational demands of post-World War II Chicago. The City's Bureau of Parks and Recreation developed this Lower West Side park on Board of Education-owned property in the late 1940s, improving it with a gravel-surfaced playground and a spray pool. Within a few years, a basketball court was added.

The Chicago Park District began managing Throop Park in 1959. In 1976, the Park District thoroughly rehabilitated the site, building a shelter, enhancing the plantings, and constructing bleachers around the resurfaced basketball court. The Board of Education formally transferred ownership of the property to the Park District in 1991. Subsequent improvements included a soft surface playground and ornamental fencing. In 1998, the Park District acquired adjacent property from the City to complete the park’s expansion.

Both the park and adjacent Throop Street bear the name of Amos Gager Throop, one of Chicago's most prominent early citizens. Born in New York, he came west to Michigan in 1832, where he worked in the forests and saw mills. By 1845, he owned enough land to begin shipping lumber to Chicago and the frontier beyond. He and his brother John Eaton Throop opened their first lumber yard at Wells and South Water (now West Wacker) Street.

The brothers soon became Chicago's leading lumber merchants. During the Civil War years, Amos Throop was instrumental in developing an extensive system of docking slips along the South Branch of the Chicago River for the City's rapidly-expanding lumber industry.

Throop served as a Chicago alderman from 1849 to 1853, and again from 1876 to 1880. Between the two terms, he was City treasurer in 1860-1861, moving on to the state legislature, where he worked to keep southern Illinois loyal to the Union cause.