Chicago Street Grid

Chicago Street Grid is an informational website that explains how Chicago’s street layout works and helps visitors and residents navigate the city. It presents the grid as a predictable system centered on State and Madison Streets: State divides east from west, while Madison divides north from south. The site explains how directional prefixes identify a location’s position relative to those streets and how Chicago’s address numbers can be used to estimate distance, using the rule that 800 address units equal one mile.

Its guides map out major mile-marker and half-mile streets, including Halsted, Ashland, Western, Kedzie, Chicago Avenue, North Avenue, and Fullerton Avenue. The website also clarifies how odd and even address numbers indicate which side of a street an address is on. Worked examples show how to interpret addresses and estimate their position within the city. Alongside its explanatory street-grid content, Chicago Street Grid offers maps, a quiz, and an “L” ridership map.