Tallgrass prairie at Midewin, as Lyndale Street may have once appeared

The Land Before Pavement

The land that underlies Lyndale Street and Logan Square is a small corner of the ancestral homelands of several Native nations, including the people of the Council of Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi), the Illini Confederacy, the Winnebago, Kickapoo, Miami, Sac and Fox. These people and other groups travelled and hunted on what is now Lyndale Street and called it home at different times long before the first houses were built here in the 1880s.

Over centuries, Native people shaped the local ecosystem by burning to attract game animals and encourage growth of valuable plants, resulting in the vast tallgrass prairies that once covered Logan Square.

Chicago is still home to many diverse American Indian communities.