• Illinois Brick Company brickyard site (Addison and Western)
• Former Riverview Park site (1903-1967)
• Wahl-Eversharp Pencil Factory Lofts (1800 W. Roscoe St.)
• Roscoe Street commercial corridor

Roscoe Village grew up along the North Branch of the Chicago River, where nineteenth-century brickyards and clay pits earned the area the nickname "Bricktown" — clay dug at the Illinois Brick Company's works near Addison and Western fired much of the brick that rebuilt Chicago after the 1871 fire. The neighborhood's modern identity took shape after 1903, when developers opened Riverview Park just to the west, once billed as the world's largest amusement park; the crowds it drew filled Belmont, Roscoe, and Western with taverns and shops, and workers began building frame houses and two-flats on land once covered in greenhouses.

Riverview operated until 1967, and its 76-acre grounds are now home to Area 3 Police Headquarters, DePaul College Prep, and the Riverview Plaza shopping center. The Wahl-Eversharp Pencil Factory at 1800 West Roscoe Street, where inventor Charles Rood Keeran patented the modern mechanical pencil in 1915, was converted into condominium lofts in 1988 — one of the neighborhood's earliest signs of the revitalization that would define Roscoe Village by the 1990s.

From a brickyard nicknamed for its trade to the site of the world's largest amusement park to a tree-lined commercial strip, Roscoe Village has reinvented its riverside ground more than once — a history worth wearing on your own walk down Roscoe Street.