The Grid Is Your Friend: Chicago Address Math, Explained Once

You use it every day and probably never think about it. Somebody says a place is at 2100 West, and some part of your brain already knows that’s a block past Damen. That’s the grid doing its job.

Here’s the whole thing in one place, for the next time you’re settling a bet or explaining to your friend from the suburbs why you don’t need GPS to find a bar.

Zero is State and Madison

Everything starts downtown. State Street is zero for east and west. Madison Street is zero for north and south. Every address in the city is counting away from that corner.

800 is a mile

Eight hundred numbers is a mile, and most of the big streets land on a mile or a half mile. Learn a handful and you can place almost anything.

Heading west: Halsted 800, Racine 1200, Ashland 1600, Damen 2000, Western 2400, California 2800, Kedzie 3200, Pulaski 4000, Cicero 4800, Harlem 7200.

Heading north: North Avenue 1600, Armitage 2000, Fullerton 2400, Diversey 2800, Belmont 3200, Addison 3600, Irving Park 4000, Montrose 4400, Lawrence 4800, Foster 5200, Bryn Mawr 5600, Devon 6400, Touhy 7200, Howard 7600.

Heading south: Roosevelt is 1200, Cermak is 2200, and after that the South Side does the work for you. 35th Street is 3500 South. 63rd is 6300. It’s the easiest part of the city to navigate on paper.

Putting it to work

2150 North Damen? Damen is 2000 West, and 2150 North puts you between Armitage and Webster. 3100 North? Just south of Belmont. You’re not memorizing addresses. You’re doing subtraction.

The streets that ignore all of this

Milwaukee, Lincoln, Clark, Elston, Ogden, Archer. The diagonals were mostly old trails and plank roads before the grid existed, and they still cut across it at angles that make six-way intersections and confused out-of-towners. They’re also where a lot of the best storefronts are.

Where it came from

The city renumbered itself around this system in 1909, after years of pushing by a Chicagoan named Edward P. Brennan, who was tired of every neighborhood having its own numbering and its own duplicate street names. A century later, it’s the reason you can give directions with two numbers.

So next time someone mentions a little shop at 1900 West, you already know it’s a short walk from Damen. Go find it.