THREE YEARS IN CHICAGO

Canonical Streets

It's often the case that a given line in Chicago's address system is consistently assigned the same street name, even if the street exists as several broken, separate sections. Pulaski Road, for instance, runs with one tiny interruption through the whole length of the city along the line parallel to State Street at a distance of five miles west, which is the line of 4000W. In many suburbs, however, Pulaski is called Crawford (which is in fact the older name, predating large Polish settlement in the region). You can see how it is useful to call Pulaski the "default" or "canonical" name for 4000 West, because it is the name most commonly encountered by the largest number of people. Crawford is an exception to the system -- real, significant, interesting, but aberrational.

In the tables below, I have repeated this little exercise for practically the entire city. From 10000N to 13800S, from 4100E to 12000W, I have examined each vertical and horizontal alignment, and chosen a street name for each one of them (usually at sixteenth-mile spacing, which means a name for 1000N, for 1100N, and yet another in between). Sometimes, this was a simple choice (Halsted vs. Clarendon for 800W) or no choice at all (Stony Island for 1600E). Other choices were made with an uneasy conscience: Kimball over Homan (3400W), Wood over Ravenswood (1800W), Loomis over Noble, Southport, and Glenwood (1400W). The point of the table is not necessarily to choose the best option, but to choose one option and stick with it, so that the overall organization of Chicago may be comprehended before the exceptions and variants are tackled. My table does not record any of these variant names, because that would be reinventing the wheel: a guide to all the variants and alternates is called a "map"!

Separately, I have used this table data to create an Anki flashcard deck for memorization, and I am happy to share it on request. I can also share the raw tables in spreadsheet form; the ones seen here were modified to be more human-readable. Please see my introduction to Chicago geography for more context on this interesting subject.

VERTICAL STREETS

Since time runs east and west in my system, vertical streets spend their entire careers in the same month or season. In other words, these streets "have" a season, just like neighborhoods and places do. Of course, some vertical streets serve as the boundaries between months or seasons, and their identities are mingled, just like the identities of the neighborhoods that straddle them.

Here, I have chosen a name for every sixteenth-mile street from Avenue A on the east (which is also the Illinois-Indiana state line) to East River at 8800 West (which is the westernmost point in the city proper, excluding the Des Plaines River forest preserve and O'Hare Airport beyond it). Just for fun, I also name the half-mile streets from 8800 through 12000 West, which is the momentous border between Year 2 and Year 3, as well as a long portion of Cook County's western border. You may not believe in my system of seasons, but it can still be a helpful mnenomic!

Here is a note about why I flagged Yates (2400E) and Narragansett (6400W). I spoke in my introduction to Chicago geography of some flaws in the logic of Chicago's address system, and here is one more for the record. There are two zones of the city (roughly corresponding to Norwood Park on the Northwest Side and South Deering on the Southeast Side) where every named vertical street shifts one sixteenth-mile to the east. By this maddening logic, Oglesby (2300+E) is promoted to 2400E (displacing Yates) while Crandon (2300E) takes over Oglesby's spot; Nagle (6400+W) is promoted to 6400W (displacing Narragansett) while Natchez (6500W) takes over Nagle's spot, and so on in this fashion. You may examine a map to see the precise extent of this behavior; I just wanted to mention it since I could not help noticing it while preparing this table. Doubtless it resulted from sloppy surveying, and it would be too confusing to rename every street in the problem area for its neighbor.

HORIZONTAL STREETS

Horizontal streets run parallel to the direction of time in my system, so they don't have seasonal identities. Hence, a table with fewer columns.

I provide half-mile streets from Old Orchard (10000 North) to Dempster (8800 North). From Dempster to Madison (0 North-South), I provide sixteenth-mile streets. Chicago streets begin at 7600N with Howard, but Evanston's and Skokie's street names are too charming to exclude, despite the resulting annoyance of some duplicate names. Please note that I draw attention to duplicates in the last column.

The zone from Madison to 31st Street is problematic, because it represents the one place where 800 units fail to correspond to a mile. Order is restored from that point south, but only a few of these streets have proper names, as the majority are simply numbers corresponding to the address (31st Street at 3100S). When sixteenth-mile streets appear on the south side, they inherit the name of the street to the north, but with a "Place" suffix instead of "Street." For instance, 53rd Place is the sixteenth-mile street between 53rd and 54th (which are quarter- and eighth-mile streets respectively). I saw no point including this repetitive type of information in the table.