• Site of the former McCormick Reaper Works
• Oakley Boulevard Italian restaurant row
• Site of former St. Michael's Parish
• Cermak Road Bridge Historic District (NRHP 2012)

Heart of Chicago takes its name from a 1978 resident survey that asked Chicagoans to name and map their own neighborhoods, formally establishing the district in the southwest corner of the Lower West Side. Its roots go back further, to 1890, when the McCormick Reaper Works recruited skilled machine operators directly from Italy's northern provinces, Tuscany, Turin, and Milan, offering wages twice what was available at home along with a paid transatlantic ticket.

Those Northern Italian families built their community around St. Michael's parish on 25th Street, and though the archdiocese closed the church in 2000, the neighborhood's Italian roots are still visible on Oakley Boulevard, where restaurants like Bruna's, open since 1933, have outlasted the factory that first brought the community here. The Cermak Road Bridge Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012, still marks the neighborhood's northern edge.

MY-NHD's Heart of Chicago collection is built for a neighborhood whose Italian roots outlasted the factory, the parish, and nearly a century and a half of change.