Beneath the Pavement: Hidden History in Cook County’s Parcel Fabric
If you zoom far enough into Cook County’s parcel data , you’ll find something strange. Beneath the steady roar of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) under the lanes of traffic, the CTA Blue Line tracks, and the median embankments, lies a full grid of property parcels. Every one has a unique PIN, neat cyan lines drawn as though the houses, alleys, and corner lots were still there. To the eye, it’s all concrete. If you were only looking at the parcel fabric and not an aerial below it, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s still a neighborhood. Rather, it is all that is left of the neighborhoods that were destroyed to create the Eisenhower, and these parcels exist for all of the Chicago area expressways. Cookviewer Image of Active Parcels as of 2024, even though none of these parcels have had any separate land uses since the Ike. Cook County’s parcel fabric is a digital layer that represents the county’s property boundaries, as an enormous and constantly updated spatial dataset that...