After Chicago gobbled up outlying villages north, west, and south of the city in a grand annexation of 125 square miles and 225,000 people in 1889, it found itself with a mess of roadways with duplicate names, houses with the same numbers, and no systematic pattern with which to organize its streets, according to the Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago.

After two decades of confusion, itinerant Urban Planner Edward P. Brennan stepped in with the proposal for a uniform numbering and naming scheme that, in sensible Midwestern fashion, registered both road direction and distance. Part of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the initiative is variously known as “the Burnham and Brennan Plan” or just “the Burnham Plan” for Edward P. Burnham’s more prominent contributions to it. The idea was to simplify the hodgepodge of identical and conflicting street names and house numbers, as well as to set up a process for giving names to new roads. What made the plan unique was its alphabetical road naming scheme for north/south streets starting with “A” at Lake Michigan and traveling west with successive letters.

Gladstone Park had already been conflicted by its three old major diagonal thoroughfares. But because most of the community developed after the Plan of Chicago was put into effect, its overlay of new parallel and perpendicular streets overwhelmed what had long been in place and had a profound effect on the local road organizational network. Still, the grid pattern provided a reliable structure for everyone living here.

Because the Gladstone Park community is in the Far Northwest section of the city, all streets in the area are set up with either a “north” or “west” designation. While people in newly-annexed towns may have groused about having to add a directional component to streets they once knew more simply as one word, they benefitted by the scheme that ordered the grid system in a very predictable way. Still, old ways had a hard time of dying and city dwellers still routinely drop the the directional prefix when interacting with others where they live, as in “Oh, I like the pizzeria at Milwaukee and Ardmore” not “the pizzeria at N(orth) Milwaukee and W(est) Ardmore.” The assumption is that your neighbors know exactly what you mean without having to bother with more formal designations.

But if one drops all the “N” and “W” directional prefixes in any kind of official capacity, such as filing a legal document or mailing a letter, there’s trouble. Nobody knows exactly which part of the city you mean. Which is why this website always clarifies Gladstone Park road names with the “north” or “west” to distinguish them from same-sounding addresses found in southern and eastern parts of the city. This eliminates any possibility of confusing Northwest Side streets with their sister streets on Chicago’s Southside just because they have the same basic name.

The new unifying grid system also set house/lot numbers consecutively out from the center city with house numbering in Gladstone Park starting with the 5200 block at W. Foster and ending in the 6300s at the northern boundary at W. Devon. Each regular long block of streets radiating out of the Loop, or ground zero, is made up of 100 numbers, usually starting with 1, although not every number is used if not needed. An address numbered 364 is about in the middle of the “300 block;” one at 1364 is the “1300 block” of that road. Eight blocks of 800 numbers (1-800, 2100-2900, 4200-5000, etc.) constitute a mile. Odd numbers are found on the east sides of the streets, even numbers on the west. This scheme did more than give each house a unique numbered address; it also helped residents to locate any one address fairly precisely and then determine approximately how far away it would be from another by providing that information without requiring people to consult a map.

When 20th Century Chicago urban planners came to approving names for its westerly-traveling roadways in the north, including into the Far Northwest Side, they had already rejected the use of numbers as street names such as those that preexisted in the south. So while you might get on W. 55th Street to drive into Hyde Park or W. 35th Street to travel west from the Loop to White Sox Park, both on the Southside, there are no streets like that in the north. All roadways going in any direction in Gladstone Park have word names.

By the time planners made their way westward from the Lake for their northerly-traveling streets to the community here, they had already gone from the A’s all the way through the N’s, leaving virtually all new north/south streets in Gladstone Park’s to be given names starting with “M.” Today a full 21 of the community’s 30 north-south streets have “M” names. Using the conventional city pattern of honoring famous people, there are streets named after railroad tycoon Charles Henry Markham (N. Markham), Mayor Roswell B. Mason (N. Mason), and theater owner James Hubert McVicker (N. McVicker). In recognition of nature, others roadways are named after flowers and trees, along with one named for a fruit tree (N. Mango).

Meanwhile, all north-south roads in Chicago had by the 1830s been designated with the “Avenue” suffix by surveyor James Thompson, according to the 1997 The Chicago Tribune article The Long and Winding Road by Mary Breslin. Thus, the great majority of roadways Gladstonians live and shop on are Avenues, not Streets, Lanes, or Drives. The only two exceptions to the north-south Avenue rule in Gladstone Park are N. Indian Road and N. Northwest Highway.

Even more so than its directional prefixes, Chicagoans tend to leave suffixes off when conversing about their roadways. Gladstone Parkers will say, “I live on Mulligan (or Miltimore or Meade) without any of the unnecessary suffixes. or With “avenue” as the default for so many of their streets, even some major corporations downtown will leave the suffix entirely off their letterheads, even if it’s not the fully-accepted (legal) USPS address. Fortunately, local postal workers have learned to handle it. When there is no confusion about which roadway this website is referring to, it also leaves suffixes off designations as per local custom. However, when dealing with official agencies such as the Cook County Tax Office or Chicago’s 3-1-1 system, residents are prompted to put both the road name prefix (North, South, East, West) and its suffix (Avenue, Road, Highway, Lane, etc.) if they want it to function.

Knowing how the Chicago naming/numbering system works not only makes it easy to find the approximate location of a house or business in the immediate neighborhood, but also gives clues to where an address further away is. Invited out of the community to see your niece in a play at Smyser Elementary School at 4310 N. Melvina? Combining the alphabetical street name scheme with the numbering pattern, you automatically know it’s the equivalent of 9 long blocks or so south of Gladstone Park, probably across the border from Jefferson Park in the Portage Park neighborhood. Alphabetically, N. Melvina is somewhere between N. Meade and N. Merrimac, so that tells you about how far west it is, too.

Because the north-south streets are the long sides of the blocks and are at least twice as long as the east-west roads on the short sides, there are about 1-1/2 times the number of north-south roads in Gladstone Park as east-wests (30 versus 19, scroll to chart below). Further cutting down on the number of east-west roads is the fact that the neighborhood is wider than it is long.