• Water Tower (1869, survived the Great Chicago Fire)
• Wrigley Building
• Wolf Point (site of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's 1780s home)
• Chicago River waterfront

Near North Side is the oldest inhabited part of Chicago — Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Haitian-born trader often credited as the city's first permanent non-Native settler, built his home on the north bank of the Chicago River at Wolf Point in the 1780s, decades before Chicago existed as a town. The area's location north of the river and east to Lake Michigan made it a natural first foothold, and it grew unevenly over the following century — an industrial west split from an increasingly affluent lakefront east.

The Water Tower, completed in 1869, was one of the only structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and still stands as the community's most literal monument to that rebuilding. The Wrigley Building, headquarters of the chewing gum empire for nearly a century, anchors the river's north bank a few blocks from where Du Sable's original home once stood.

From the city's very first home on the riverbank to the landmark tower that outlasted the fire that leveled almost everything else, Near North Side has been rebuilding and reinventing itself longer than any other part of Chicago. MY-NHD's collection carries that founding history forward.