• The Villa District (Chicago Landmark, NRHP)
• Independence Park
• Original Irving Park train station site
• Old Irving Park historic homes

Irving Park takes its name from American author Washington Irving, though it was almost called "Irvington" until developers realized another Illinois town already used that name. Major Noble first farmed the land starting in 1843, and in 1869 four New York businessmen, Charles T. Race, John S. Brown, Adelbert E. Brown, and John Wheeler, bought Noble's farm and struck a deal with the Chicago and North Western Railroad: they'd build a station if the railroad would stop trains there. That original station still serves the neighborhood today, on the same spot where it was built.

Substantial mansions rose along Irving Park Boulevard through the 1870s, and after Jefferson Township joined Chicago in 1889, the neighborhood kept building, adding more than 5,000 structures between 1895 and 1914 alone. The Villa District, a collection of 126 Arts and Crafts and Prairie School bungalows, holds both a Chicago Landmark designation and a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, and Independence Park, established when Irving Park ran its own park district starting in 1910, still anchors community life today.

MY-NHD's Irving Park collection is built for a neighborhood that almost got its name wrong, then spent the next century and a half getting everything else right.