• Lakewood Balmoral Historic District (NRHP 1999)
• Bryn Mawr Historic District
• Edgewater Beach Apartments
• Cochran-era Main Line street names

Edgewater takes its name from developer John Lewis Cochran, a Philadelphia-born tobacco salesman who purchased vacant land in the town of Lake View in 1885 and built Chicago's first fully planned suburb, complete with paved streets, electric lighting, and sewers. Cochran named the streets after stations on Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line, a pattern still visible today in Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, and Ardmore Avenues. Lake View was annexed to Chicago in 1889, though Edgewater's 300 residents voted against it.

Cochran's restriction to single-family homes held for two decades, until the 1908 extension of the Northwestern Elevated Railroad brought apartment buildings and density to the neighborhood he'd built. The Lakewood Balmoral Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, and the Bryn Mawr Historic District still preserve blocks of Cochran's original vision, and the pink Edgewater Beach Apartments building still marks the shoreline where the famed Edgewater Beach Hotel once stood. Edgewater didn't become its own official Chicago community area until 1980, after decades as part of Uptown.

MY-NHD's Edgewater collection is built on the same idea Cochran sold in 1885: a corner of the city planned, from the start, to feel like nowhere else.