“Demolition Hold List, Chicago, IL” was a website I maintained at http://cheerocracy.com/demolition-hold-list/ from March 2009 to February 2013 as a “place for info about architecturally significant buildings in danger of being demolished (or are already gone).” The site contained data going back to January 2003. In January 2017 I deleted that site and imported all of its content here into this “Holds” category on my personal website.
Here’s a screenshot of the site upon launch.
This is a complete list of all “structures subject to review for historic or architectural significance prior to the release of a demolition permit” in the City of Chicago since 2003. The source for this permit data is the “Demolition Delay” page of the City of Chicago Department of Community Development Web site.
Many of the buildings subject to these permits have been demolished. This is an archive of those buildings. The hope is that you can help build this archive by contributing photos, drawings, and memories.
Many of these buildings are still under review. The hope is that people can document these buildings while they are still here. Many people are already engaged in these efforts. In order to get notified more quickly of additions to the list, you can track it here over on Versionista, and also subscribe to an RSS feed of changes here. It’s a little buggy– the City of Chicago site goes down relatively often, and the page is therefore “changed” to a 404. Improvements to this tracking system are to come.
You can also see this list in spreadsheet format or you can download the list in CSV format.
Go here to see the details on how I created these tools. This site was created in March 2009 by Daniel X. O’Neil. Basically, it is an experiment in civic information & participation focused on a subject that is dear to me– archiving the city as we move through it and make decisions about it.
Most of what you need to know in order to use this site and the services around it can be found in the right-hand column of every page. Here is a detailed take on how I created this stuff. Hopefully it can be a model for other non-programmer types like me to make community sites based on data.