During the 1880s, George M. Pullman ran a railroad car factory south of Chicago's city limits. In order to provide his laborers with housing, he constructed Pullman—a town governed by his company exclusively for the workers of his company. Since the managers and administrators of the Pullman business controlled both wages and rent, they effectively had complete power over their employees. This struck many as unfair (it struck them as more than unfair later when they held a strike in 1894). Despite Pullman's reputation as one of the world's best towns with many amenities and natural beauty, a number of workers began building their own houses in an area to the southwest of Pullman.

As other industrial facilities sprung up in the south Chicago region, the developments of these Pullman employees were soon joined by those of laborers from other manufacturing plants nearby. Soon the area flourished from the workers and employers of a number of factories, including International Harvester, Whitman and Barnes, and Carter White Lead Paint. The mixed-community of working-class and white-collar residents thrived and was eventually incorporated into the city of Chicago in the 1890s.

In the 1920s, sociologists from the University of Chicago merged a number of smaller communities into the area known today as West Pullman, as part of their initiative to create a series of neighborhood boundaries that Chicago uses to this day. Overall the large West Pullman neighborhood remains much of what it has always been—a residential community for people on all ends of the economic spectrum.