• Oak Woods Cemetery (1854)
• Stony Island Arts Bank
• 75th Street commercial corridor ("Renaissance Row")
• Auburn Park Lagoon

Greater Grand Crossing takes its name from the same 1853 railroad collision that named its smaller namesake neighborhood, but grew to encompass five once-independent communities: Grand Crossing, Brookline, Essex, Brookdale, and Park Manor. German craftsmen and farmers, English and Irish railroad workers, and eventually Swedish and Italian immigrants settled these separate enclaves before Chicago annexed the whole area with Hyde Park Township in 1889, with growth accelerating further after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

During the Great Migration, Greater Grand Crossing became a center of African American life on the South Side, home to Oak Woods Cemetery, the resting place of Jesse Owens, Ida B. Wells, Enrico Fermi, and Chicago's first Black mayor, Harold Washington. The 75th Street commercial corridor, still known locally as Renaissance Row, and the Stony Island Arts Bank, a former savings and loan building reborn as a cultural archive and gallery space, keep the neighborhood's creative energy alive today.

MY-NHD's Greater Grand Crossing collection is built for a community stitched together from five old railroad enclaves into one of the South Side's most culturally rich neighborhoods.