[2] The community benefits from its location along the waterfront, its accessibility to Lake Shore Drive, and its proximity to major institutions and attractions such as the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, and Jackson Park.

Like all of what is now the City of Chicago, the South Shore community area was originally inhabited by a number of Algonquian peoples, including the Mascouten and Miami.

[3] After the expulsion of Native Americans by white settlers in the nineteenth century, it became characterized by small settlements including Essex, Bryn Mawr, Parkside, Cheltenham Beach, and Windsor Park.

[4] Following the June 29, 1889 elections, the South Shore community area was annexed into the City of Chicago with the entirety of Hyde Park Township.

As in other parts of Chicago, the desire for affordable housing at the start of the twentieth century led to the large scale construction of bungalows.

[4] After racially restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional by Shelley v. Kraemer, African American families began to move into historically white neighborhoods such as South Shore.

[4] The South Shore Commission initiated a program they called "managed integration", designed to check the physical decline of the community and to achieve racial balance.

[7] Like many other urban neighborhoods across the United States undergoing racial change and tensions, many of the white residents began to choose to move to new locations.

The firm of Marshall and Fox, architects of the Drake, Blackstone, and Edgewater Beach hotels, were hired to design an opulent, Mediterranean-style clubhouse for a membership that included some of Chicago's most prominent families.

Between the first and second World Wars, a housing boom brought a development of luxury cooperative apartments and mansions to the neighborhood surrounding the club.

Presently, Chicago Lakeside Development has proposed plans that call for the completion of this southern portion of lakefront with the development of new parklands, beaches, and a continuous waterfront bicycle and jogging path that will link Calumet Park and Beach in the East Side neighborhood to the South Shore Cultural Center in South Shore.

Completion of such a project would result in improved access to Chicago's southern lakefront and connect it to neighborhoods such as Hyde Park and Bronzeville to the north.

Built in 1915, it is Chicago's only surviving building designed by John Van Bergen, a former member of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture firm.

Body camera footage without audio was released immediately contrary to past practices of months-long waits for video in other police shootings.