• Edgewater Beach Apartments
• Former Edgewater Beach Hotel site
• Lake Shore Drive's northern terminus
• Sheridan Road lakefront corridor

Edgewater Beach takes its name from the grand hotel that once defined this stretch of lakefront: the Edgewater Beach Hotel, designed by architect Benjamin Marshall and opened in 1916 at 5349 N. Sheridan Road. Painted a distinctive yellow and known as the "sunrise" building, the hotel featured a 1,000-foot private beach walk, its own radio station, a chocolate factory, and even a heliport, drawing celebrities from Babe Ruth to Marilyn Monroe.

The hotel's fortunes turned when the 1953 extension of Lake Shore Drive cut it off from its own beach. It closed in 1967 and was demolished in 1970, but its pink sister building, the Edgewater Beach Apartments, still stands at the north tip of Lake Shore Drive, a lone survivor of the neighborhood's glamorous lakefront era. Today high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums line the same shoreline the hotel once commanded.

MY-NHD's Edgewater Beach collection carries the memory of a hotel that once put this stretch of Chicago's lakefront on the map for the whole country.