• Read-Dunning Memorial Park (2002)
• Wright College
• Chicago-Read Mental Health Center
• Dunning Square shopping center

Dunning takes its name from David Dunning and his son Andrew, who bought 120 acres here in 1865, just south of the Cook County Poorhouse and Insane Asylum established in 1851. When the county built a rail depot to serve the growing institutional complex in 1882, it was named Dunning in their honor, and the surrounding settlement took the same name. The area was annexed to Chicago in 1889, drawing Swedish, German, and Polish immigrants who settled around the rail and streetcar lines.

The county complex, later known as Chicago State Hospital, operated here for over a century before closing in 1970 and merging into the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center, which still serves the community today. Wright College opened on part of the site in 1934, and Dunning Square shopping center now occupies another portion. In 2002, the Read-Dunning Memorial Park was established to honor the roughly 38,000 people buried in the area's Potter's Field between the 1850s and 1920s, a quiet corner of the neighborhood dedicated to remembering those the city once forgot.

MY-NHD's Dunning collection is made for a neighborhood that has grown from a place people feared into a quiet, close-knit community that remembers where it came from.