The first European settlers to the area that developed as West Englewood were predominantly German and Swedish farmers who arrived in the 1840s.

The combination of open spaces for housing and the presence of railroad lines made these neighborhoods ideal for Chicagoans looking for less crowding and moving from the urban center destroyed in the fire.

[6] These improvements in transportation made the Englewood area an easy commute for workers traveling north to the stockyards, a major employer, and downtown.

At the same time that hundreds of thousands of European immigrants were coming to Chicago, where unskilled labor jobs in the stockyards and steel mills enabled them to support families, Blacks from the rural South started migrating to the industrial city.

European immigrants and ethnic whites dominated separate territories on the South Side: the Irish, Polish, Italians and others had their own centers of population which they protected against each other and against blacks.

[9] During the 1960s and after, advances in civil rights opened more areas of housing to blacks, and they followed other Americans into the further reaches of the city, settling in West Englewood and other southern neighborhoods.

The precipitous population declines in the decades since 1980 led to widespread abandonment of houses and apartment buildings throughout West Englewood.

Virtually all of the lots cleared in the area remain vacant and the neighborhood's population has continued to rapidly decline.