“The histories of some pieces of land in Chicago are well-known.
“The Thompson Center in the Loop stands on the former site of the Sherman House Hotel. The Chicago Police Belmont Area Headquarters and DePaul College Prep occupy land where one once would have found the thrill rides and sideshows of the Riverview amusement park.
“Regenstein Library, that brutalist behemoth on 57th Street that’s just that’s just a little out of step with the rest of the University of Chicago campus, stands on the site of the original Stagg Field, the setting not only for football games, but most famously for the first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.
“But what about something a little more obscure, like a neighborhood business strip, or residential block, or even the very house where you live? Finding those histories poses a much greater challenge that can’t be accomplished with a simple web search or AI inquiry.
“A project at the University of Chicago is setting out to change that, using massive century-old maps housed at Regenstein Library and state-of-the-art machine learning. The goal of the Chicago Urban Heritage Project is far more than just to satisfy curiosity about the history of a given piece of property; it’s filling in blanks for the history of entire neighborhoods and Chicago as a whole, through cycles of demolition and rebuilding, disinvestment and gentrification.
“The Chicago Studies program at the University of Chicago spearheaded the project, working with the Center for Digital Scholarship at the UChicago Library.
“The project uses Sanborn fire insurance maps — large-scale historical maps that went into minute detail about each building on each block in Chicago and thousands of other cities and towns. The maps were made at various points in the 20th century; some even date back to the 19th. Student researchers use machine-learning software to digitize the information on the maps and develop a user-friendly guide to history.
“Once the project is complete, it will allow users to view what a Chicago community looked like a century ago based on the Sanborn maps, and how it has evolved in the time since.
“And so as part of that, we encourage and support undergraduate research about the city,” Skrable said in a Zoom interview in March. “And several years back, I began realizing that our students weren’t being made aware early enough of sort of the wealth of resources for studying and learning about the city of Chicago, and in particular its history.”
“The result was a series of research experiences for which students could sign up, the first of which was an urban history of 55th Street, which runs through Hyde Park and acts as a northern border to the U of C campus. In the mid-20th century, 55th Street was known for a vibrant strip of nightclubs and lounges, including the Bee Hive Lounge near Blackstone Avenue, where Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and Art Blakey all performed, and where Clifford Brown and Max Roach recorded a live album in 1955.
“Interactive maps of several Chicago communities as seen a century ago or more are already available on the Chicago Urban Heritage Project website. Eventually, the goal is to overlay all the data learned from the old maps so that a user can learn about a piece of land in Chicago decade by decade.” (Harrington, CBS Chicago, 4/27/26)
Preservation Chicago applauds the progress on this effort. We are looking forward to partnering with the University of Chicago on the next phase of the Sanborn mapping project.