Chicago South Side parks add pickleball courts in $500,000 upgrades

Chicago is putting pickleball into a much bigger South Side refresh, with more than $500,000 in improvements planned for Tuley, Cole, Brown Memorial and Dawes Parks, plus the Hamilton Park Cultural Center. The package pairs a pickleball court with a mini soccer field and a media lab, turning the project into a neighborhood upgrade rather than a single-sport add-on.

That approach fits the Chicago Park District’s broader push. The district says pickleball courts have recently been added at its facilities and lists pickleball among its year-round sports offerings. The sport has been building inside the public system for years: in 2022, the Park District said it planned 50 new courts by 2025 and said 80 courts were already in parks, and a 2024 South Side installation at Metcalfe Park came through the district’s Pickleball Mania program.

The South Side sites already have the bones of a destination loop. Tuley Park in Chesterfield spans 18.54 acres and includes 10 lighted tennis courts, a gymnasium, an auditorium, clubrooms, a playground, an interactive pool and baseball-softball diamonds. Brown Memorial Park in Chatham is smaller, at 6.92 acres, with a tennis court, softball diamonds and open space. Dawes Park in Auburn Gresham has deep roots in park development, with improvements beginning after the district acquired land in 1947 and 1948, and by the early 1960s it included a picnic grove, athletic field, playground, running track, tennis courts and a small fieldhouse. Cole Park is also part of the funding list.

Hamilton Park Cultural Center brings another layer to the route. The fieldhouse at 513 W. 72nd St. sits inside a 28.88-acre park in Englewood that already holds two gymnasiums, an auditorium, a dance studio, an archery range, a multipurpose room, a pool and courts for baseball, softball, basketball, handball and tennis. A media lab there fits the Park District’s cultural-center model, which frames these buildings as creative hubs for arts partnerships, after-school arts programming, art camps, visual art exhibitions and other community programming.

For traveling players, that makes the South Side more interesting than a lone court stop. Chicago is threading pickleball into long-established parks with tennis, pools, fieldhouses and youth spaces, which creates the kind of multi-site, neighborhood-scale itinerary that can fill a day instead of an hour.