Lincoln Park began to take form in the early 1860s, when the city decided to turn what was then City Cemetery into Lake Park to provide green space for residents moving to Chicago's near north side. As the city grew, residents who could afford to do so moved away from the dirt and congestion of the inner city to fringe neighborhoods like this one. City leaders constructed parks to provide residents with country-like settings in which to take refuge from the chaotic industrial metropolis.

The city renamed the area Lincoln Park in 1865 to honor the slain president and in 1869 established the Lincoln Park Commission to oversee the conversion of the cemetery into a public park. Many of the people interred at City Cemetery were removed to other graveyards, but thousands still lie at rest here, stuck beneath Lincoln Park after the 1871 Chicago fire destroyed the markers identifying remaining graves.

The Commission spent the rest of the century stabilizing the area's sandy soil and shoreline, and laying out paths, plantings, and ponds. Included in these improvements was the installation of sculptures like "Standing Lincoln,” designed by famous sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens and dedicated in 1887, as well as one honoring U.S. president and Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant and another celebrating Civil War General Philip Sheridan, for whom Sheridan Road is named.

Lincoln Park houses the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Lincoln Park Conservatory, which opened here in the late nineteenth century. The Chicago Academy of Sciences (now the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum) and the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) joined them when they relocated to the park in 1893 and 1932, respectively.

The park expanded in stages from North Avenue. Today, the lakeshore park continues north uninterrupted to Hollywood Avenue in Edgewater.

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