"Mid pleasures and places though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."
--John Howard Payne, "Home Sweet Home" (1823)

This Week:

This week's class will take a close look at three types of housing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chicago: the mansion, exemplified by the Glessner House on Prairie Avenue; the luxury apartment building, in particular those built on Chicago's Gold Coast; and the bungalow, which became the dominant form of detached house in many city neighborhoods and suburbs.

Readings:

• There will be no written texts for this week. Instead, you are asked to study the visual materials in this week's notebook intensively. These materials include floor plans; photographs of streets, individual buildings (exteriors, interiors, and architectural details), and the people who occupied them; builders' advertisements; and other related images.
• Electronic Resources:
  
  Glessner House
  John Jacob Glessner, vice-president of sales for Warder, Bushnell and Glessner, moved to Chicago in 1870 from Springfield to establish a branch of the company, Champion Reaping and Mowing Machines. In 1902 the firm merged with other producers to form International Harvester, which then dominated the manufacturing of agricultural implements. Glessner and his wife, Frances Macbeth Glessner, hired the prominent Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson to design a house to be used primarily as a winter residence; the family summered in Littleton, NH. The house is located at 1800 South Prairie Avenue, in the neighborhood just south of the Loop that became the residential area of choice for Chicago's wealthiest homeowners in the years after the fire. Richardson finished the design before his death in 1886, and his successors, Charles A. Coolidge and George F. Shepley, completed the house in 1887. The fittings, furnishings, and decorative objects within the house are a unified group, designed chiefly by architects or artists with architectural training. The Glessner family occupied the house for half a century; it is now a museum, owned by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, founded in 1966 expressly to preserve the house.
  
  Luxury Apartment Houses
  After Potter Palmer built his baronial mansion on the newly created Lake Shore Drive in 1882, the Northside neighborhood known as the Gold Coast became an increasingly fashionable site for the city's elite residents. This area is bounded by Oak Street on the south, Lake Shore Drive on the east, North Avenue on the north, and Dearborn Street on the west. Just before the turn of the century, families of high social standing began to move into multiple-unit buildings in the neighborhood. The Marshall Apartments at 23 (later renumbered 1100) Lake Shore Drive, opened to occupants in 1906, set the pre-Depression standard for luxury apartments in Chicago and established its architect, Benjamin Marshall, as the city's premier designer of apartments. The building was described in the Chicago Evening Post as an "ultra high class apartment building" designed "largely for entertaining purposes like the quarters of many wealthy residents of New York." Most of the tenants of the Marshall and similar buildings also had suburban homes, farms or summer cottages on Lake Geneva or in New England.
  
  Bungalows
  Further down on the economic spectrum, many solid working-class families were still able to fulfill the dream of owning a free-standing house on a privately-owned lot during Chicago's great building boom of the 1920s. The boom was fueled by post-war prosperity and the pent-up demand for housing (construction had ground to a halt during the war). This decade witnessed the proliferation of a housing type known as the bungalow, a term applied to any simply-designed, single-story house. The bungalows were the descendants of nineteeth-century workers' cottages, updated with modern conveniences such as electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and kitchen appliances. Built on land made accessible by the extension of the El and the automobile, bungalows grew up in every part of the city and in the suburbs, but certain areas were especially dominated by them. The bungalow belt extended from south of 87th Street on the South Side to west of Western Avenue on the Southwest, out to the suburbs on the West Side, and west of Crawford (now Pulaski) Avenue on the northwest side. Construction followed a variety of patterns. Some aspiring homeowners purchased lots and then hired an independent contractor to build a house from one of his established plans or from working drawings they had purchased from a mail-order company. Other customers went through real estate developers, who were ready to construct homes from a stock of plans, or sell them finished bungalows.

Questions to consider:

• In general, what sorts of things can we learn from these visual sources that are conveyed less successfully by texts? Conversely, what kinds of information do the images fail to provide that textual sources might supply?
• How did the form of these homes relate to their immediate environs, as revealed by the images? To the larger geography of the city?
• In what ways does architectural form shape domestic life, and vice versa? What can you discern about the domestic patterns of the residents of these homes from the plans and photographs?
• What are the essential differences among these three types of housing? Given these differences, are there any domestic ideas or values that are common to them all?

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Last Updated: 02/19/99