Brighton Park

      Prayer Points

• Praise God for the existing churches in this community. Pray for their unity and a continued focus on evangelism.

• Gang influence and teen pregnancy rates are very high at the local high school. Pray for transformation in the neighborhood, that it would be a place where young people can safely learn and grow.

• Brighton Park was once full of blue collar work, but much of those jobs are no longer available. Pray for the provision of employment for the residents.

• Pray for an increase of the spiritual temperature of the believers in the neighborhood. Pray that they would hunger and thirst to see God’s kingdom come in Brighton Park as it is in heaven.

      Ethnic Breakdown

• Asian (5.5%)
• Black or African American (1.1%)
• Hispanic or Latino (82.0%)
• White (10.8%)

Neighborhood Background

Brighton Park, taking its name from the Brighton livestock market in England, became a center for livestock trading in the late 1850s. Although the completion of the Union Stock Yard in 1865 closed Brighton’s yards, the area attracted many other industries and mills. Brighton Park was annexed to the city of Chicago in 1889.

By the 1880s and 1890s, infrastructure and transportation improvements drew a diverse population of French and Eastern European Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians. Industrial parks began opening in 1905, creating more jobs and leading to population growth in Brighton Park, which steadily became more residential.

Between 1930 and 1980, however, Brighton Park’s population significantly declined due to deindustrialization and the closing of Crane Manufacturing Company. To this day the community remains largely residential and has a growing commercial section. By 2000 the population boomed again due to a large Hispanic movement into the neighborhood.