Almost nothing in this selection stands on ground that was always here. Millennium Park is a concrete lid over a working rail yard, Maggie Daley Park is a landscape engineered onto the roof of a parking garage, Burnham (Daniel) Park is six miles of fill pushed out into the lake, Grant Park rests partly on rubble from the fire of 1871, and Ping Tom Memorial Park took the rail ground that had kept Chinatown from its own river. Chicago built its front yard on purpose.
They differ in scale and in what they hold. Lincoln Park runs seven miles up the lakefront with a zoo, beaches and harbors; Jackson Park keeps the lagoons and the surviving palace of the 1893 world’s fair; Washington Park is a single enormous Olmsted meadow; Humboldt (Alexander Von) Park has a sand beach nowhere near the water; Oz Park is a compact neighborhood green. Choose by three things: who is coming with you, what the season is doing, and which train lands you there — the ‘L’, Metra Electric, or the water taxi to Ping Tom Memorial Park.
At a glance
| # | Place | Score | Reviews | Stands out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Millennium Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 92 845 | Editors' pick |
| 2 | Grant Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 21 005 | — |
| 3 | Lincoln Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 20 864 | — |
| 4 | Maggie Daley Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 8 619 | — |
| 5 | Jackson Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 7 641 | — |
| 6 | Burnham (Daniel) Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 4 218 | — |
| 7 | Ping Tom Memorial Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 4 088 | — |
| 8 | Humboldt (Alexander Von) Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 3 899 | — |
| 9 | Washington Park | ⭐ 9.1 | 3 784 | — |
| 10 | Oz Park | ⭐ 9.5 | 2 239 | — |
Highlights
-
Editors' pick:
Millennium Park
Opening hours
Open late: Millennium Park, Grant Park, Lincoln Park, Maggie Daley Park, Burnham (Daniel) Park, Ping Tom Memorial Park, Humboldt (Alexander Von) Park, Oz Park.
Check the hours before you set out — they shift on holidays and out of season.
Full ranking
1. Millennium Park · ⭐ 9.7
(92845 reviews)
+7 photos
Chicago, IL 60602, United States
Millennium Park opened on July 16, 2004, four years behind schedule and more than three times over budget, and about 300,000 people came through in the first three days. Its 24.5 acres sit on a concrete lid built over a former Illinois Central rail yard, live commuter tracks and two levels of parking, which is why it is regularly described as the world's largest rooftop garden.…
«A little piece of coziness, calm and rest in a green place.
It's worth visiting with famil…»
2. Grant Park · ⭐ 9.5
(21005 reviews)
+7 photos
331 E. Randolph St N Columbus Dr, Chicago, IL 60601, United States
Three hundred and nineteen acres of lawn, fountain and festival ground stretch between the Loop's wall of towers and the open water of Lake Michigan. Chicagoans have called Grant Park the city's front yard for more than a century, and they mean it literally: a mail-order merchant took the city to the Illinois Supreme Court four times to keep this ground clear of buildings, and…
«A lovely city park! A well-kept and clean park. It has several monuments and the amazing B…»
3. Lincoln Park · ⭐ 9.5
(20864 reviews)
+7 photos
500-5700 N Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60614, United States
At 1,208 acres, Lincoln Park is the largest park in Chicago and, by most counts, the second-most-visited city park in the United States after Central Park, with roughly 20 million people a year. It runs seven miles up the North Side lakefront and packs a free zoo, a Victorian conservatory, a nature museum, seven public beaches, three harbors, a golf course and a National Histor…
«We spent 3 hours there and still couldn't see the whole zoo. It's very well organized, the…»
4. Maggie Daley Park · ⭐ 9.5
(8619 reviews)
+7 photos
337 E Randolph St, Chicago, IL 60601, United States
Rolling hills, groves and winding paths fill the northeast corner of Grant Park, and almost none of it rests on natural ground. The entire park is a roof: it sits on the deck of a parking garage holding some four thousand cars, in the middle of the Loop, with every hill, tree pit and skating surface engineered into a structure that was never meant to carry a landscape. Michael…
«Maggie Daley children's play park is the most amazing playground you could imagine. I'm a…»
5. Jackson Park · ⭐ 9.3
(7641 reviews)
+7 photos
6401 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
More than 550 acres of lagoons, meadows, beaches, harbors and old fair grounds spread along the South Side lakefront, in a landscape that has been rebuilt twice over. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux drew the first plan in 1871, for what was then a sandy, marshy, wind-scoured lake edge that nobody wanted. Two decades later the same Olmsted returned to reshape it into the…
«When you're here, it's easy to forget you're in the city! Lots of room for walking, joggin…»
6. Burnham (Daniel) Park · ⭐ 9.3
(4218 reviews)
+7 photos
1200-5700 S DuSable Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60615, United States
A narrow green ribbon runs for roughly six miles between Grant Park and Jackson Park, holding beaches, harbors, restored prairie, a skate park and one of the finest pieces of landscape design on the Great Lakes. Almost every acre of it is manufactured. There was no shoreline here to speak of: the park was filled out into Lake Michigan through the 1920s and 1930s, deliberately,…
«I really enjoyed visiting this lakefront spot after so many years! The park is small but w…»
7. Ping Tom Memorial Park · ⭐ 9.3
(4088 reviews)
+7 photos
1700 S Wentworth Ave, Chicago, IL 60616, United States
Red ornamental railings, a pagoda-roofed pavilion and weathered limestone scholar's stones line the South Branch of the Chicago River, the downtown towers rising just upstream. Seventeen acres of gardens, lawn and rebuilt riverbank now occupy what was a Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad yard — ground that for a century kept Chinatown from reaching its own waterfront. It is t…
«I got caught in a terrible storm and had to stay under cover for about 20 minutes. While I…»
8. Humboldt (Alexander Von) Park · ⭐ 9.5
(3899 reviews)
+7 photos
1400 N Humboldt Dr, Chicago, IL 60622, United States
Two lagoons joined by a hand-built "prairie river", a beach with real sand and no lake in sight, a Prairie School boathouse under a long low roof, and a formal garden guarded by bronze bison left over from the 1893 World's Fair. Close to two hundred acres of nineteenth-century landscape design that has been, since the 1950s, the anchor of Chicago's oldest Puerto Rican community…
«This is a great green space that includes walking paths, butterfly gardens, baseball diamo…»
9. Washington Park · ⭐ 9.1
(3784 reviews)
+7 photos
5531 S Martin Luther King Dr, Chicago, IL 60615, United States
An unbroken lawn on a scale no other Chicago park can match, a lagoon at its southern end, and along the eastern edge a hundred concrete figures streaming past a hooded Father Time. Washington Park is 372 acres of Frederick Law Olmsted's thinking, carried out after the Great Fire destroyed the original drawings, and it holds both the DuSable Black History Museum and one of the…
«I recently visited Washington Park, and it was a really calm and refreshing experience. Th…»
10. Oz Park · ⭐ 9.5
(2239 reviews)
+7 photos
2021 N Burling St, Chicago, IL 60614, United States
A Tin Man welded from chrome car bumpers on one corner, a bronze Cowardly Lion on another, a Scarecrow standing among the perennials and Dorothy with Toto beside the playground. Underneath the theme this is an ordinary, hard-working neighborhood park of about fourteen acres — ballfields, tennis courts, a fieldhouse — given a second identity by four sculptures and by a Chicago a…
«We started coming here because we got sick (and I mean SICK — we thought I was going to di…»
Questions & answers
Which place tops the ranking? Millennium Park — score 9.7/10 (Editors' pick).
How many places are in the list and how were they chosen? The selection includes 10 places chosen by our editors based on rating and reviews.
What is the average rating in the top? 9.4/10 — average score of 10 places in the list.
Which place has the most reviews? Millennium Park — 92845 visitor reviews.
Sort by the outing. Small child: Maggie Daley Park, play zones graded by age, the toddler ground at the western end. Running and cycling: the Lakefront Trail through Lincoln Park and Burnham (Daniel) Park, bikes and feet apart. Picnic: the lawns of Grant Park, the meadow in Washington Park. Water: lake beaches, Buckingham Fountain, the inland beach at Humboldt (Alexander Von) Park. Quiet: the Japanese garden in Jackson Park at opening hour. In August keep to Lurie Garden in Millennium Park or the shade trees of Oz Park — Burnham (Daniel) Park offers almost no shade. Winter is no dead season: the skating ribbon, the rink downtown, the Lincoln Park glasshouses.
What this list does not do: nothing on dog runs, on step-free routes beyond a single bridge, or on lighting after dark. Cycling appears only as the lakefront trail, not the streets between parks. Geography is narrow too — most of the ten sit downtown or on the water. For the green at the end of your own block, look elsewhere.
See also:
Best flower shops
Sources: Google ratings and reviews, official websites and social media of the places, other open data. Selection and texts by the chicagoname.com editorial team, August 2026.