City Council makes Edgewater’s Bryn Mawr Avenue strip a Chicago landmark district

The City Council voted on September 23, 2026 to make the Bryn Mawr Avenue District in Edgewater an official Chicago landmark district. The designation covers the 900 through 1100 blocks of West Bryn Mawr Avenue, between Broadway and Sheridan Road, a three-block commercial strip that has been the neighborhood’s business core since the 1890s.

The vote closed out a process that began in early 2025, when 48th Ward Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth asked the Department of Planning and Development to study whether the corridor qualified. Wards were redrawn in 2023; Edgewater’s Bryn Mawr corridor sits in the 48th Ward, according to the City of Chicago’s ward page. Here is what the designation covers, according to the city’s September 23 announcement.

• The district takes in 15 contributing buildings put up between 1897 and 1928, most with ground-floor storefronts and one or two floors of apartments above.
• The styles range across Classical Revival, Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival, Gothic Revival, Mediterranean Revival and Arts and Crafts.
• Three large apartment buildings are inside the boundary, two of which were already individual Chicago landmarks.
• Landmark status protects the exteriors of contributing buildings against significant alteration or demolition.

What landmark status changes on the street

The corridor was already on the National Register of Historic Places, listed on April 20, 1995, according to the 48th Ward office. A federal listing is mostly honorary. A Chicago landmark designation is the one with teeth: the city’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks reviews exterior work and demolition permits for every contributing building. Property owners also become eligible for local incentives such as the Adopt-A-Landmark grant program for restoration work, Block Club Chicago reported.

The commission found the district met four of the seven criteria in the city’s landmarks ordinance. A district needs to meet at least two. Block Club reported the four were that the strip is a critical part of the city’s heritage, that it has important architecture, that it includes work by important architects, and that it has a distinctive theme as a district.

The big names inside the line are the Edgewater Beach Apartments at 5555 N. Sheridan Road, the pink building at the north end of the lakefront skyline, and the Belle Shore Apartment Hotel at 5550 N. Kenmore Avenue. The smaller two- and three-story buildings between them are what the district is really about. Edgewater Historical Society President John Holden has said some of them date to the 1890s, per Block Club.

How the approvals unfolded

The designation moved through the city’s process in a series of votes over about six months. The dates below come from Block Club’s coverage and the ward office.

1. March 2026: The 48th Ward office announced that the planning department would take the district to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, after a DPD planner surveyed the corridor’s 22 properties.
2. April 2, 2026: The commission granted a preliminary landmark recommendation.
3. June 2026: The commission held a public hearing on the proposal.
4. July 9, 2026: The commission voted unanimously to give a final landmark recommendation.
5. September 23, 2026: The full City Council approved the designation after the Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards signed off.

In a statement the day of the vote, Manaa-Hoppenworth thanked Landmarks Illinois and the Edgewater Historical Society and said the ward has worked with the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce for three years on filling storefronts, according to Block Club. She said the effort had filled 15 vacant storefronts along Bryn Mawr. Preservation Chicago, which testified for the district at the commission hearings, credited several Edgewater Historical Society members for years of work on the designation.

The demolition fight at 1114 W. Bryn Mawr

The landmark push collided with a development proposal midway through. Harlem Irving Companies, which bought a set of parcels at the west end of the strip in 2020, applied to tear down three buildings, at 1106 and 1114 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. and 5614 N. Winthrop Ave., to build a six-story building with 95 apartments and about 6,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, Block Club reported.

The commission split the request. In May it approved demolition of 1106 W. Bryn Mawr and 5614 N. Winthrop, which the city considers non-contributing because earlier alterations stripped their historic features. At the July 9 hearing it gave a final denial for 1114 W. Bryn Mawr, a two-story brick building from 1909 that the city says contributes to the district because of its Classical Revival details, chiefly the cornices. Demolishing it would have an adverse effect on the district, planning department staff argued.

The developer told the commission it had already spent $6 million on the site and that the project might not be economically feasible without that parcel, according to Block Club. Under the city’s landmarks ordinance the owner can ask for an economic hardship hearing, arguing that the denial leaves no reasonable use of the property. Preservation Chicago has proposed keeping the 1909 facade and building the new apartments behind it. As of the September 23 vote, neither side had announced a resolution, and the ward office has said it wants the developer to keep working with the city on a version of the project that fits inside the district.

Why the corridor matters right now

Bryn Mawr between Broadway and the lake had a rough half-decade. The pandemic closed three of the strip’s largest restaurants and several other anchors, and the CTA’s Red-Purple Modernization work shut the Bryn Mawr Red Line station for more than four years, Block Club reported. The rebuilt station reopened in 2025, and a run of new businesses has opened along the avenue since.

The landmark district is meant to lock in the streetscape while that recovery continues. What it does and does not do is worth spelling out, based on the city announcement and the ward office’s explainer.

• Exterior changes to a contributing building, including storefront work, need a permit review from the landmarks commission.
• Interiors are not covered, so tenants can reconfigure shops and apartments without landmark review.
• Non-contributing buildings inside the boundary can still be replaced, as the two approved demolitions show.
• Owners can apply for city restoration incentives that are only open to designated landmarks.

The three blocks are a short walk from the Bryn Mawr Red Line station at 1119 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., and the CTA’s 84 Peterson and 147 Outer DuSable Lake Shore Express buses stop at either end of the strip. The Edgewater and Rogers Park page has more on the area.

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