Chicago Historic Resources Survey

Find an address in the CHRS

The City's inventory of every Chicago building put up before 1940, surveyed between 1983 and 1995. Preservation Chicago digitized the whole of it — the book and the hand-colored field maps — and it is all here, in full and searchable. Choose a community area on the map or in the list to read its chapter.

Other sections of the CHRS

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, and is the source for everything on this page.

Cover of the Chicago Historic Resources Survey, published by the
Commission on Chicago Landmarks

How to read the CHRS

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: Potentially significant in the broader context of the City of Chicago, the State of Illinois, or the United States.
Orange: Potentially significant in the context of the community.
Yellow: No individual significance, but good physical integrity.
Yellow-green: No individual significance, where the major integrity problem was artificial siding — asphalt, aluminum, vinyl.
Green: Substantially altered, more than about a tenth away from the original exterior, but possibly significant if restored.
Purple: So extensively altered that the original appearance could not be determined by looking at it.
Blue: Built after 1940, and so too recent for the survey to evaluate.

The CHRS by community area

What the ratings mean today

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. Everything below those two was recorded and then, for the most part, left alone.

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 here has not been judged insignificant. It may simply not have been recorded.

The field maps, in color

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 neighborhood pages, one page for each of the City's 77 community areas, and each neighborhood's maps are one document you can read there and turn the pages of. A sheet covers about sixteen blocks, and its number — 10-01, 21-08 — is the survey's filing code rather than a description, so a list of them tells a reader nothing about where to look. Bound in order, they can simply be browsed. The remaining 184 print only their streets, or name a neighbor across the boundary, and we would rather leave a sheet unplaced than put it on the page for the wrong neighborhood.

Where this came from

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. Preservation Chicago did not publish it. The copy digitized here is from the Preservation Chicago library, scanned from hard copies we 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.