Questions

No. NM Chicago, LLC is a private company, a limited liability company organized in the State of Illinois, working from a rented drafting room at 657 W Fulton St. It is not a city agency, not a department and not a public office, and it holds no city records.

Records that belong to the city stay with the office that created them: recorded plats with the recorder, building permits with the buildings department. We read those documents, copy the parts that matter to a block, and explain them in plain prose, but the record itself is not ours and never becomes ours.

Yes, of any block this office has drawn. Ask by the plate number if you know it, or by the street and face if you do not. Copies are sent flat at full size where the paper allows it, with the field table and the legend, and every copy is indexed by block, face, plate and revision so the file can be followed later.

We cannot send a plate that does not exist. If your block has not been walked, say so and it will go into the queue for a walk; you will be told honestly whether that is likely this season.

No. We are not licensed surveyors, and our plates are documentary, not legal. A plate from this office records what stands on a block face on the day it was walked. It does not locate a lot line, set a corner, mark a monument, or say where a boundary falls.

For a boundary dispute, a lot split, a fence line, or anything that goes to a lender, a title company or a court, hire an Illinois-licensed professional land surveyor. Our plates can be useful background for that work and we will send them to a surveyor on request, but they are not a substitute for it and no plate from this office should be relied on as one.

A question mark means the feature could not be settled from the public way. It is used in three cases: a figure that could be read two ways, such as a date stone worn down to the last digit; a feature taken from a recorded document but not seen on the ground, such as an alley line now built over; or two measurements that disagree after being taken twice.

The mark means verify on site, not wrong. We would rather print an honest question than a confident figure we cannot stand behind. If you can settle one, write in and it becomes a dated revision.

Yes, and corrections from residents are the best ones we get. Write with the plate number, the structure number on the field table, what you believe is wrong, and where your information comes from: a date stone, a deed, a building permit, a photograph with a date on it, a family record.

A correction is entered as a revision. The earlier note is not erased; the new note is added beside it with its date and its source, and the revision letter moves on. If the source cannot be named, the entry is marked uncertain and stays that way until someone can name it.

It is this office's own log number, assigned the first time a block is walked, and it appears nowhere else. It exists so that a field book, a plate, a change log and a set of plat copies can be tied together without relying on a street address, which changes when a building is renumbered or replaced.

When you write to us, give the street and the face you mean. If we have the block, we will give you our number for it; if a recorded plat reference exists for the block, we will give you that too, because that is the one a title company or a surveyor will recognise.

No. The work is Chicago neighborhoods, from the bungalow belt to the lake front. The grid, the alley dedications and the plat references are local knowledge, and a plate drawn by someone who does not walk the neighborhood is not worth the paper it is drawn on.

If you are outside the city, the useful starting point is the recorded plat for your subdivision, held by the county recorder. A guide to reading one is on the survey work page and applies anywhere the same documents are used.

A single face takes a morning to walk and longer to draw, and a plate is not issued until the block has been walked a second time. In practice that means a request answered this season may not produce a plate until the following one. We would rather say that plainly than promise a sheet we cannot draw honestly.

Requests are queued in the order they arrive. Blocks are also chosen by the office, where a face is about to change and the change should be recorded first, so a queue position is not the only thing that decides what gets walked next.

The plate stays, and a revision is issued. The structure is drawn as it stands at the next walk, and the earlier drawing is kept behind it in the folder, so the file shows both. The change log records what was removed, described as it was, without comment on whether the loss matters.

That is the point of keeping the superseded sheets. A block that has changed three times in twenty years should be readable at all three dates, not only at the latest one.

No. The photographs on this site are real photographs contributed to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons by named authors, used under the licence each author chose. Every one is listed with its author, licence and source on the photo credits page.

They illustrate the kind of thing a plate records. They are not photographs of the blocks in our index, and nothing on a plate is drawn from a photograph: a figure on a plate has been measured on the ground, twice, and written into a field book.