04/13/2026
It is important to utilize professionals when searching for your dream home and/or investment property. 🏡🏘️
Realtors work with title companies to ensure a thorough title search is completed, uncovering potential issues like liens, unpaid taxes, or outstanding legal encumbrances.
Realtors ALSO pull records to identify deed restrictions (CC&Rs) that limit property usage, such as Homeowners Association (HOA) rules or utility easements.
AND THE OCCASIONAL IRONCLAD PRESERVATION OF A COW PATH - EVEN AMONG SKYSCRAPERS. 🐮👇🐄
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KiQiZZiU9/?mibextid=WC7FNe
🐄 If you walk past 100 W. Monroe Street in the Loop, you’ll probably walk right past a dark, random little alleyway cut directly into the side of the skyscraper.
It looks like a maintenance tunnel. But legally? It’s a 180-year-old Cow Path.
Back in 1844, a man named Willard Jones bought a massive plot of land in what is now the bustling financial district. At the time, he just needed a way to herd his cows from his farm to the grazing pastures without being blocked by new buildings.
So, when Jones started selling off pieces of his land, he wrote a hyper-specific, ironclad clause into the deed: the buyers had to leave a 10-foot-wide path open FOREVER so his cows could pass through. If they ever blocked it, they would lose the land.
Fast forward to today. The cows are long gone, and the land is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But because of how strict that 1840s contract was written, every single developer who has built on that lot has been legally forced to build their skyscraper around the cow path.
Today, the 100 W. Monroe building literally has a tunnel paved right through its ground floor, just in case a ghost from 1844 needs to herd some phantom livestock through the Loop.
