This website is a comprehensive record of the Chicago Landmark program: all 497 Chicago Landmarks and Landmark Districts, each with its Landmark Designation Report. To date, we have assembled, digitized and made searchable 481 reports. We are actively working to locate the remaining 16 missing Landmark Designation Reports.
Preservation Chicago, a preservation advocacy nonprofit, built and maintains this website free of charge. This is a resource that needs to exist to facilitate accessibility and ease of research for Designated Chicago Landmarks.
Why this website
A landmark is the city’s argument for itself, and the designation report is where that argument is written down — the research, the criteria, and the case for protection, set out at the moment Chicago decided a place mattered. No single repository held all of them: comprehensive, accurate, and covering the full fifty-odd years the program has been active. Preservation Chicago chose to step forward and build one — comprehensive, free and definitive — a permanent home on the web where every report is at hand for researchers wherever they are.
The count to date: 497
The collection holds a total of 497 Chicago Landmarks, including 427 individual landmarks and 70 landmark districts. To our knowledge, this is the most complete and current count of Chicago Landmarks that exists. Every record is held separately and tied to its own designation, so the total is counted rather than estimated. As new Chicago Landmarks are designated, their reports are added here and the total grows.
What is a Chicago Landmark
A Designated Chicago Landmark is formally protected from demolition by City ordinance. The Landmarks Ordinance covers “areas, districts, places, buildings, structures, works of art, and other objects having a special historical, community, architectural, or aesthetic interest or value to the City of Chicago and its citizens.” An individual landmark is a single such place. A landmark district is an area designated as a whole, where the character of the streetscape is the thing protected rather than any one building.
City Council created an advisory commission in 1957 to compile a list of significant buildings. In 1968 it adopted the landmarks ordinance that gave the Commission on Chicago Landmarks the responsibility of recommending which places should be protected by law, and the ordinance was revised in 1987 to set out the designation process more clearly. Designation has run continuously since, and this collection holds reports from 1970 to 2026.
Scanned complete, searchable inside
The text of every report has been read by optical character recognition, and it is searchable here — not only the names and addresses, but the words on the page. 13,297 pages are indexed: 12,633 pages of designation reports and 664 pages of the Chicago Historic Resources Survey. A researcher anywhere in the world can search a phrase, a material, a style or a builder's name and find where it occurs.
A result names the document and the page, and opens the reader at that page. This is the difference between knowing that a sixty-page scan mentions what you are looking for and being taken to the paragraph.
Accuracy
The optical character recognition was conducted with Google Document AI. A total of 5,628 pages were read at a median character confidence of 98.8 percent. However, machine transcription is never perfect, and on a 1970s offset page it is weakest exactly where a researcher looks first — title blocks, photograph captions, proper names. So the scanned page is published beside the text and remains the authority. Where the two disagree, believe the page.
With sincere thanks to our partners
The City of Chicago, whose open data underpins the index, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks staff, who research and write the designation reports that are the substance of this collection.
Mapping Chicago Preservation, our partner at the University of Chicago, whose independent copies contributed to 160 records.
The Chicago Architecture Center, whose Buildings of Chicago is an authoritative account of the city’s architecture and a valued reference alongside this collection.
Help support this effort
Founded in 2001, Preservation Chicago leverages the power of historic preservation to transform long-neglected historic assets into the dynamic neighborhood anchors essential for cultivating healthy, vibrant, diverse and sustainable communities. From impossible to inevitable, we catalyze change.
This website is offered for free. However, if this saved you time and you value this effort, please consider buying us a coffee — Preservation Chicago is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) historic preservation advocacy organization with a Candid Platinum and Charity Navigator 4-star rating.