But Edward Paul Brennan, an unsung hero of urban planning, spent much of his life taming the navigational chaos of Chicago’s adolescence, and his legacy lives on more than a century later - even if few people know his name. It wasn’t always going to be that way, though, and many people fought the change. Today Chicago is known for having one of the simplest street systems of any big city in the world, with every address emanating out from a central origin point at the intersection of State & Madison Streets.
These are the result of a massive shift in how the city handles street names and addresses. Fisch and Toben aren’t the only Chicagoans with two house numbers - in fact, any building in the city built before 1909 probably had a different number than it does now.
