Milwaukee Avenue Special Character Overlay District
- Featured
- Preservation Planning
- Civic
- Urban Planning
To guide the rapid change along the Milwaukee Avenue Corridor, McGuire Igleski, in partnership with Site Design Group, created a unique set of design guidelines for the Milwaukee Avenue Special Character Overlay District. The guidelines draw from previous planning efforts and distinct characteristics of the corridor through design strategies that embrace the historic nature of the built environment, guide rehabilitation work at character buildings, and promote appropriate and compatible new construction on infill lots or when replacing non-character buildings. The guidelines not only consider the built environment, but address the community’s concerns about the rehabilitation of existing character buildings and increasing affordable housing. To ensure the community’s concerns and needs are met, the team included a robust and bilingual community engagement process. The Milwaukee Avenue Special Character Overlay District and design guidelines were adopted by the Chicago City Council and codified in the City’s Zoning Ordinance in July 2024.
Chicago, Illinois
City of Chicago
2-mile Corridor, 230+ buildings
Site Design Group
Goodman Williams Group
Borderless Studio
Milwaukee Avenue has served as one of the city’s core commercial centers for nearly 150 years, though its origins date to several hundred years earlier when it was established as a Native American trail. Since its settlement by European immigrants and first-generation Chicagoans during the mid-1800s, the neighborhood’s periods of growth and development were propelled by improvements in transportation infrastructure, which carried waves of settlement by Chicago’s early immigrant population from Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland. As the area continued flourishing toward the end of the 19th century, the rapid arrival of immigrants generated an economic boom that made Milwaukee Avenue among Chicago’s most significant commercial districts outside of the Loop. Development was only stifled by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and the construction of the Kennedy Expressway in the late 1950s, which resulted in a significant population decline and subsequent deterioration of the built environment.
In the following decade, the community saw the first signs of a resurgence that continued into the 21st century, spurred by the founding of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, which focused on improving housing and community spirit in 1963. Also, beginning in the 1960s, the community’s demographics began to shift following an influx of Hispanic immigrants, helping to stabilize the area’s population and contributing to its vibrancy and ethnic and economic diversity that continues to define the corridor’s sense of place and character today.