The Gold Coast is the wealthiest neighborhood in Chicago and the second wealthiest neighborhood in the United States. Only Manhattan's Upper East Side is more affluent. The Gold Coast consists mostly of high-rise apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive, facing Lake Michigan, but also includes low-rise residential blocks inland. As with many neighborhoods, its exact borders are subject to dispute, but generally extend south to Oak and west to LaSalle, excluding the Carl Sandburg Village housing development between LaSalle, Dearborn, Division, and North (located in Old Town and built as a buffer to encroaching blight in the 1960s).
The Gold Coast was an unexceptional neighborhood until 1885, when Potter Palmer, former dry goods merchant and owner of the Palmer House hotel, built a fanciful castle on Lake Shore Drive. Over the next few decades, Chicago's elite gradually migrated from Prairie Avenue to their new homes north of the Loop.
The "Gold Coast Historic District" was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 30, 1978.
Gold Coast is zoned to the following Chicago Public Schools schools: Ogden School, O.A. Thorp Scholastic Academy (a magnet school) and Lincoln Park High School.
