• Former Dodge Chicago Plant building (Albert Kahn, 1942)
• Tootsie Roll Industries factory
• Kahn's tic-tac-toe tunnel network
• Cicero Avenue corridor

Ford City takes its name from an odd twist of history: the massive complex here was built in 1942 as the Dodge Chicago Plant, designed by industrial architect Albert Kahn to manufacture Wright Cyclone engines for B-29 bombers, and after the war it briefly built just 51 cars for the ill-fated Tucker Corporation before Ford Motor Company leased the site to produce aircraft engines during the Korean War. When developer Harry Chaddick bought the vacated plant in 1961 and opened a shopping mall there in 1965, he kept the Ford name.

At its peak, Ford City Mall was the largest shopping center in Chicago outside downtown, with more than 135 stores. The mall closed permanently in June 2026 after the city ordered it shut down over structural and fire-safety deficiencies, but the historic Kahn-designed building endures: Tootsie Roll Industries has manufactured candy in the plant's northern wing since 1967, still using Kahn's original tunnel network for storage and archives.

MY-NHD's Ford City collection carries the name of a building that has been a bomber-engine plant, a car factory, a candy factory, and a mall, and somehow made all of it fit under one roof.