Last year, I visited the city of Chicago. I enjoyed its beautiful architecture, its rich and seedy history, and its obscenely unhealthy food. Today we will ignore most of that and instead focus on these numbers. I first noticed them on the Blue Line from the airport. I didn’t know what we were supposed to be 1132 west of. But after some searching, I learned that these numbers describe Chicago’s grid system. Every building in the city gets an address number relative to the intersection of Madison and State Streets. The larger the number, the further you are from the center of Chicago’s universe. This is surprisingly well-organized. How did it get this way?
The story begins, like many others, with money. 250 years ago, a group of guerrilla fighters stole some colonies from the King of Great Britain and formed an illegitimate terrorist regime called “The United States of America.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. This regime borrowed a lot of money to fight off the British Army. But the Articles of Confederation didn’t allow the federal government to collect taxes to pay back its debts. So until the U.S. could figure out a different way to run the country, it had to raise funds by selling some of its stolen land.
The government split the country into a hierarchy of squares. A grid, if you will. The biggest squares were called townships: six miles on all sides, cut into 36 square mile sections and even more subsections. There was no GPS, so federal surveyors had to visit every acre of the nascent country and portion the land by hand. The government sold lots to people sight unseen: only the surveyors would know who got rich fertile soil or muddy garbage land.
Of course, the country isn’t square everywhere, so the surveyors had to force order in defiance of mother nature. Where lakes and rivers interrupt the grid, surveyors made “partial townships.” Here’s a partial township of some unremarkable swampland in the state of Illinois. This lake stands in the way of geometric perfection. And this river, the Chicago River, is pretty unusual: it forks into two branches here, near the southeast corner of section 9.
Section 10, over here by the lake, is “reserved for military purposes.” Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War, sent Captain John Whistler to build a fort here in 1803. The British were still trading with the native population in parts of the Midwest, so the Americans brought some firepower to let everyone know they were The Big Boys. They named this fort after the Secretary, hence Fort Dearborn. A group of Potawatomi natives burned the fort down in the War of 1812, so the military built another one in its place, presumably to taunt them.
This area didn’t receive much attention until President James Madison ordered a canal from the Illinois River to Lake Michigan. Boats were the best way to transport goods at the time, so canals were quite popular. This canal’s commissioners asked James E. Thompson to survey the two ends of the canal: one by the Illinois River in Ottawa, and one by Lake Michigan in Chicago.[1]
Thompson’s team went to Chicago in the summer of 1830. They drew a grid near the fork in the river and gave names to sixteen streets. These two streets don’t get to have names just yet. If we compare the handiwork of this map to the federal surveys, we can see that this grid is around the southeast corner of section 9. The river always looks a little different, but we’ll chalk that up to the primitive tools of the time. In three years, this area would become the town of Chicago, and it would start growing immediately.
Here is Chicago in 1834, just four years after Thompson’s survey. In a stunning display of consistency, the city continued to be divided into neat little rectangles and—let’s just ignore that.
This map is actually interesting because it relates the layout of Chicago back to the federal survey. Every township had 36 sections, and the law required section 16 to have a school. This map marks the “school section” in yellow, just under section 9. This street on the border finally gets a name: it's called "Madison Street". This poor street wouldn’t get a name until Fort Dearborn closed for good. They called it “State Street.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s review. The town of Chicago started on Thompson’s grid, bounded by what we now call Madison, State, Desplaines, and Kinzie streets. These old maps suggest that Madison & State lie on the south and east boundaries of township section 9. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management keeps track of the townships to this day, so I’ve used their data to confirm this. This implies two things: 1) Thompson aligned Chicago’s grid with the original federal survey of Illinois. 2) Someone aligned the modern numbering system with Thompson’s map and, by extension, the federal survey. This was a much deeper connection than I expected when I started researching for this video.
There’s a beautiful order to the current system. But this order sprang from several decades of chaos. You might be wondering how a grid could possibly be chaotic. So let’s fast forward to 1861, about thirty years after Thompson’s survey. Say you’ve got business on West 12th Street. According to this map, that’s north of North Street and south of South Western Blank Road. But, hey, at least it’s north of South Street.
Maybe you want to visit a friend on 350 Michigan Avenue. Or was it Michigan Street? Once you figure that out, you might think if you’re near the 300s that you’re at least lined up with where you want to be. But no! The numbers on one side of the river have nothing to do with the numbers on the other side. These bad naming and numbering practices made navigating much harder for no reason.
At the turn of the 20th century, Chicago’s government wanted to fix this. This newspaper article details a cunning plan from an alderman named Charles Gary. Parallel streets would have the same numbers, of course. Get rid of the duplicate street names, obviously. And finally, make “north,” “south,” “east,” and “west” make some sense. Find an intersection of two streets and start numbering buildings from there. Make those streets the boundary of the section 9 township so it’s aligned with the grid of the nation, right where Thompson started it all 70 years ago. It was only natural that Charles Gary planned the numbering to start at Madison Street... and Michigan Avenue. (beat) What?
Ok, there’s a reason for this. Michigan Avenue is right along the lake shore. Under Mr. Gary’s plan, there would be no need for “east” or “west” streets because there’s nothing east of Michigan Avenue except the water. Truly an elegant, bulletproof solution from one of the finest aldermen Chicago has to off—hmm. Why would you do this.
Clearly this was unacceptable. The people were crying out for a man in tune with the streets of Chicago. A man who could create a system of beautiful harmony. A man who works with straight lines every single day. What Chicago needed was a harp maker.
Edward P. Brennan, employee of Lyon & Healy, suggested keeping the “west” and “east” markings to number buildings from State Street, in line with “the old governmental survey.” Every mile you go from Madison & State, the address numbers would go up by 1000. Each increment of 100 represents a city block. Brennan also wanted to call north- south roads “avenues”, east-west roads “streets”, and diagonal roads “roads” and “ways” depending on their direction.
This plan churned its way through the bureaucratic machine until around 1908. During the churning process, the planners abandoned the avenue/street distinction and made address numbers go up by eight blocks per mile instead of ten, as you can see here.
Every fourth block, marking half a mile, is written in giant numbers. You can see that the numbering follows a clear, consistent pattern across the map and there’s no reason to go south of Madison Street. How could you do this to me.
Alright, you got me. The grid isn’t perfect. Humans had a hand in making it, after all, so there were bound to be hiccups. One mile south of Madison Street, we don’t have 8th Street. We have 12th Street, tarnished with the wrong number for decades.
Part of the problem is that the streets don’t make uniform blocks everywhere. You want a square mile to look like this, with 64 perfect squares. But whoever built this city in its infancy didn’t know about the plan, so they built their little rectangles instead. This corridor between Madison and 12th is split into all different numbers of streets, but someone decided 12 should be the number, so 12 it was. Down the next half mile, someone chose the chunkiest blocks on Earth to count to 16th Street; then after another half mile we go to 22nd Street.
Brennan mentioned this madness in his original proposal, but here’s how he described it: (ahem) “Twelfth street is really Tenth street, Twenty-second street Twentieth street, and they are respectively a mile and two miles from State and Madison streets.” This sounds like a riddle. Brennan couldn’t defeat the power of inertia, so Chicago is left with this nonsense. Each mile is eight blocks, except the first three miles south of Madison Street go 1200, 2200, 3100. Every mile after that is one less than a multiple of eight, which is truly cursed.
But there’s one more thing. Both Gary and Brennan wanted to rename the streets, but the first map under the new system has a lot of the same old street names. While Chicago could never fix the clumsy numbering problem, they could eventually make these names consistent across the city. Nowadays, if you’re on, say, Armitage Avenue, you know you’re 20 blocks, or two and a half miles, north of Madison Street. Armitage doesn’t cross the river, but it keeps its name on both sides, so you can keep your bearings.
Many American cities suffer from grids, but Chicago’s is special. Not only is it more square than, say, Manhattan or San Francisco, it also has a supportive naming and numbering system where you can gauge distances and orient yourself no matter where you are.
None (so far).