• West Chatham Bungalow Historic District
• Chatham-Greater Grand Crossing Commercial District
• Whitney M. Young, Jr. Branch, Chicago Public Library
• Illinois Central Railroad corridor (Metra Electric)

Chatham's low, swampy ground was known simply as Mud Lake or Hogs Swamp when Irish, Italian, Swedish, and Hungarian immigrants — many working for the Illinois Central Railroad, which still runs along the community's eastern edge — began settling it in the 1860s and 1870s. The area was annexed to Chicago as part of Hyde Park Township in 1889, and the Chatham name itself arrived later, with the Central Chatham and Chatham Fields subdivisions platted in 1914 under strict new zoning and property standards.

Those standards left a lasting architectural legacy. The West Chatham Bungalow Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, preserves 283 Chicago bungalows built between 1913 and 1930. The Chatham-Greater Grand Crossing Commercial District, a designated Chicago Landmark, still shows off the terra-cotta storefronts that once anchored the 79th and Cottage Grove shopping corridor, and the Whitney M. Young, Jr. branch of the Chicago Public Library continues to serve the neighborhood that, since the late 1950s, has stood as one of Chicago's most stable middle-class African American communities.

MY-NHD's Chatham collection is built for a neighborhood defined by the standards its residents have upheld for generations, block by block.