• National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame
• Our Lady of Pompeii Church
• Holy Family Church
• Taylor Street commercial corridor

Little Italy grew from the wave of Italian immigrants who began arriving in Chicago in the 1850s, concentrating along Taylor Street by the 1890s in numbers that reached roughly 10,000 by 1895. Jane Addams' Hull House, founded in 1889 just blocks away, sent its very first invitation to neighborhood residents written in Italian, a reflection of just how thoroughly Italian the surrounding streets had become.

That concentration held for decades, at its peak home to a third of all of Chicago's Italian immigrants, until the University of Illinois broke ground on its Chicago campus in 1963, a decision that demolished roughly half the old neighborhood and displaced thousands of residents. What survived still centers on Taylor Street, home to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame and historic parishes including Our Lady of Pompeii and Holy Family, one of Chicago's oldest Catholic churches.

MY-NHD's Little Italy collection is built for a neighborhood that lost half its footprint to a university campus and never lost its identity.