• North Branch Canal (Ogden's Canal)
• Wrigley Global Innovation Center
• Former Republic Windows & Doors building
• Halsted/Division Street bridges

Goose Island owes its existence to William B. Ogden, Chicago's first mayor, who in 1853 launched the Chicago Land Company to excavate clay for brick-making along the North Branch of the river. Workers dug a channel that rejoined the river by 1857, creating Chicago's only island. Irish immigrants, many from a squatter settlement called Kilgubbin, moved onto the new island soon after, and the name Goose Island stuck, likely a reference to the geese the settlers kept.

By the late 1800s, Goose Island was packed with tanneries, breweries, soap factories, grain elevators, and rail yards, its water access making it a natural fit for heavy industry. That industrial identity has carried into the present in a new form: the Wrigley Global Innovation Center opened at the island's north end in 2005, and the former Republic Windows & Doors building now houses the federally backed Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute.

MY-NHD's Goose Island collection is built for Chicago's only island, a place shaped by a mayor's canal, an immigrant community's resilience, and more than a century of reinvention.