• Sidetrack (opened 1982)
• Ten pairs of Art Deco-style rainbow pylons (installed 1997)
• Northalsted Market Days festival grounds
• Halsted Street commercial corridor (Belmont to Grace)

Before North Halsted had any official name, it was where Chicago's gay community regrouped after being pushed out of earlier gathering places downtown and near Old Town through the 1960s. Bars along this stretch of Halsted Street became more than nightlife — they served as meeting halls and safe harbors at a time when police harassment was routine. Sidetrack, opened in 1982 by Jose "Pepe" Peña and Art Johnston, grew from a single bar into a multi-room complex and became one of the corridor's longest-running institutions.

The bars did political work as much as social work: in 1987, owners along the strip chartered buses to rally support downtown for the Chicago Human Rights Ordinance, which passed the following year, outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. Ten pairs of Art Deco-style rainbow pylons, installed along Halsted after the corridor's 1997 city recognition, now mark the same blocks those buses once loaded from. Every August, Northalsted Market Days fills the same stretch, having grown into one of the largest street festivals in Illinois.

North Halsted's history is a street-level one: bars that doubled as organizing halls and a festival that still fills the same blocks every summer. MY-NHD's collection is built from that ground-up version of the story.