The Chicago Historic Resources Survey is the City’s inventory of every Chicago building put up before 1940, surveyed between 1983 and 1995. Preservation Chicago digitized the whole of it, and it is published on ChicagoLandmarkReports.org. The book is there in full and searchable to the page; the hand-colored field maps are there as images, on the community area pages.

Read and search the complete CHRS

Source from the City of Chicago Data Portal (link to City website)

How the survey was made

Surveyors drove every street in each of fifty ward areas and assessed every property against three criteria: its age, its degree of external physical integrity, and its level of possible significance. Each building was then marked with one of seven colors, in colored pencil, on outline maps of about sixteen blocks each.

Red and orange are the two that still carry weight. A red- or orange-rated building that is not a landmark can still be given a 90-day hold on a demolition permit, which is the window in which a case for it can be made.

The hand-colored field maps

The survey’s colors were recorded by hand on structure outline maps prepared from aerial photographs. When the survey was published, printing them in color was beyond the budget, and the book says so plainly: the colors, it notes, “appear here as black or gray tones.” The original hand-colored sheets survive — 1,090 of them, in the colors the surveyors actually used. 906 of them are bound into the community area pages, one page for each of the City’s 77 community areas.

A rating is not a designation

A building in the survey is not a Chicago Landmark, and a Chicago Landmark is not necessarily in the survey — the survey stops at 1940, and it was finished thirty years ago. Buildings have been altered, restored and demolished since.

And absence is not a verdict. The survey was a monumental undertaking, carried out on foot and from the street across fifty ward areas over twelve years, and it missed a great many buildings. A building that does not appear has not been judged insignificant. It may simply not have been recorded.

Indexes and appendices

The survey’s indexes are its finding aids. The Address Index gives every surveyed address with the community area it falls in; the Architect and Building Style indexes are, between them, one of the few systematic accounts of who built Chicago and in what manner. Appendix A describes exactly how the survey was carried out. All of them are at Chicago Landmark Reports.

Credit

The Chicago Historic Resources Survey was carried out by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, and it is a public document of the City of Chicago. The copy digitized at Chicago Landmark Reports is from the Preservation Chicago library, scanned from hard copies collected over the years; the field maps come from the Internet Archive. The text of every page has been read so that it can be searched.

Additional information about the CHRS is available from the City’s Historic Preservation Division at (312) 744-3200.