Eastwest Number

[Annette Fazzari]

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Travel writer and Chicagoan Luis Gusto's video post about the Chicago grid helped inform a lot of the content you'll find here. You can find more of his "Living in Chicago" vlog (and subscribe to future episodes) on YouTube.

We begin our exploration of the grid with a short historical video about the origins of the grid system by "Chicago Aussie" Jack Brandtman. You can find more of his Chicago-focused content on YouTube as well.

As the video above describes, Chicago's street system was a complicated mess well into the early 20th Century. Although the 1830 city plan made provision for an orderly system of north-south and east-west streets, the annexation of surrounding communities (such as the Village of Hyde Park) had led to duplications of names, and even whole addresses, across the growing city. Things got so bad that the postal service threatened to stop delivering mail to Chicago addresses.

In 1901, Rogers Park resident (and private citizen) Edward P. Brennan approached the city council with a solution: re-name and re-number nearly all city streets according to a new convention, wherein street numbers would locate properties relative to central X (east-west) and Y (north-south) axes, with an imaginary center point at the intersection of Madison (east-west) and State (north-south) streets, in the heart of the downtown business district. Eight years (and dozens of City Council meetings) later, Brennan's proposal was adopted by the city council, and the Chicago grid system was implemented.

Learning the grid system requires some effort, but once you understand it, it will enable you to navigate Chicago with much more confidence. A grid-savvy Chicagoan immediately knows, for example, that Harper Library (1116 E. 59th St.) can be found on the north side of 59th Street, which should be an east-west road approximately 7 miles south of the city center (and therefore on the South Side). That same Chicagoan, when asked to meet a friend at Kimbark plaza (53rd and Woodlawn) on a cold winter evening after a long day of studying in Harper, immediately recognizes that this would involve a seven block walk, that that's almost a mile, and that they don't want to do it in January. See how useful?

Although there are a few exceptions (see "diagonals" below), almost all Chicago streets run either north-south or east-west. To make matters even simpler, those directions reflect actual compass directions: a "north-bound" street in Chicago really does run toward the north pole, a "west-bound" street will eventually take you to Iowa, and an "east-bound" street will always drop you in Lake Michigan.

Brennan's plan for Chicago's new numbering system effectively divided the city into quadrants, delineated by State St. (north-south) and Madison St. (east-west) -- see the red lines on the historic map below. Because of this, each street address in Chicago now includes a cardinal direction (N, S, E, or W). This lets you know two things about an address:

This leads to another handy rule of thumb: since State St. (which divides streets into E and W) is located fairly close to the lake, and the shoreline of Chicago is a slight diagonal, almost any street that begins with "E" (i.e., that is located east of State St.) will either be in the loop or on the South Side of the city -- see the lower right quadrant of the map below to visualize this.

This is a simple, but important rule to remember: the center of the grid (that is, the place where the X and Y axes cross) is at State and Madison, in the heart of Chicago's historic downtown/the Loop. Remember: State is a north-south street, and Madison is an east-west street.

To restate the previous rule in terms of this new knowledge, any address that begins with "N" (e.g., N Broadway) will be located on a north-south street, and north of the imaginary line created by Madison street. Any address that begins with "S" (e.g. S Western Blvd) will be located on a north-south street, but south of Madison. An address that begins with "W" (e.g. W Roosevelt Rd) will be an east-west street located somewhere west of State St. And finally, an address that begins with "E" (e.g., E 59th St.) will be an east-west street located to the east of State St., and will almost certainly be located either in the Loop or on the South Side (due to the curve of the lakeshore).

As we mentioned above, the intersection of State and Madison streets is the center of the grid. It's also the ZERO-POINT for all addresses in Chicago. To put it another way, lower address numbers in Chicago are going to be closer to Madison or State streets; higher numbers will be further away. (Preview of coming rules: the grid will actually tell you how far away an address is from Madison or State -- see the next few rules to learn how.)

Both this rule and the previous rule suggest an important observation: prefixes are essential in knowing where you are supposed to be in the city. By virtue of its grid system, Chicago frequently has two versions of each address, one on each side of either Madison (for north-south streets) or State (for east-west streets). To return to a previous example, Harper Library is located at 1116 E 59th St. There is also a building at 1116 W 59th -- it's actually an empty lot on a quiet block in Englewood.

Fun sidebar: South Side artist Tonika Johnson has built an entire project/exhibition around this quirk of Chicago geography, in which she brings together residents of the same Chicago addresses from different sides of the city. Learn more here!

Perhaps the BEST feature of the Chicago grid is its street numbering convention. Per Brennan's 1901 plan, each city block can have no more than 100 addresses...and each new block starts the next hundred numbers.

This means (to return to a previous example) that 101 N State isn't just "kinda more north" than 1 N State. It means that it is exactly 1 block north of it! Likewise, the Willis Tower (233 S. Wacker) isn't just "somewhere south of Madison" -- it's about 2.5 blocks south of it. Likewise, we can now say with confidence that Harper Library (located at 1116 E. 59th) is a little over 11 city blocks east of State St.

The following map indicates where many of Chicago's neighborhoods (not Community Areas, see previous article!) are located in relation to the grid -- see the numbers along the edges of the map, which give grid/address block numbers for many major Chicago streets.

Another almost magical feature of the Chicago grid is the uniform length of ALL sides of an average city block: 1/8 of a mile. This makes it easy to calculate, not only relative distances (e.g., "Belmont is just 8 blocks north of Fullerton"), but also actual distances between streets, addresses, and so on.

For a South Side example, consider Hyde Park. 55th St is exactly 4 blocks north of 59th St, which means that walking from North to Harper along University Ave is about a 1/2 mile walk. That's also the distance between Cottage Grove Ave (800 E) and Woodlawn Ave (1200 E), which means that walking from the Harris School to the Jewel along 60th St is also about 1/2 a mile. As you can see from the figure below, that half mile distance is replicated block by block -- walking from Pizzaria Nella at 55th and Woodlawn to the Green Line stop on the far side of Washington Park (boundaried by MLK Boulevard, 400 E) would therefore be almost exactly a mile.

Another feature of the Brennan proposal that was eventually adopted by the city is a simple, but helpful, numbering convention: in the city of Chicago, address numbers on the north and west sides of streets are always even, and address numbers on the south and east sides are always odd.

This also means that "next door neighbors" -- in Chicago, anyway -- won't have adjacent house numbers. If I live at 1118 E. 54th St., my next door neighbors will likely be 1116 (to the north) and 1120 (to my south) -- remember that numbers get bigger the further you go from the center points, in this case from Madison St. 1117 and 1119 E 54th St. are neighbors to one another, and live across the street from me.

One other quick note: although each new city block starts the next 100 address numbers (e.g. 1100, 1200, 1300, etc.), the numbering of buildings within blocks is not as uniform across the city. Thus, it's not safe to assume that 1118 actually the 9th building on the 1100 block, nor that it lies exactly .18 of the way down the block, etc.

If all of this seems almost impossible to translate into the "real world" when you're out and about in the city, Chicago's official signage can help! Almost all street signs include that street's grid reference as well (look to the signs that are over the streets, e.g. on light poles, not the ones that you find on short poles on street corners).

This is especially true on the South Side of the city, where -- as you may have already guessed -- street names directly reference the grid. Starting with 8th St. (in the loop), almost all E/W streets on the South Side match their grid/address coordinates. This means that 55th St. marks the beginning of the 5500 South block, 79th St. marks the beginning of the 7900 block, etc. Note that a few South Side streets are named, mostly historic roads or boulevards -- for example, 55th Street is also known as Garfield Boulevard as it approaches Garfield Park, and 1200 S is still named "Roosevelt Rd." Still, this can make navigation a lot easier on the South Side!

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