gets its day in the sun. And how.
Living ain't living in Chicago unless you're in a
double-wide, 5,000 square foot tract-mansion or in
an oversize three-story yuppie condo building---if
some homebuilders and real estate types are to
believed.
The rebuke comes in the form of the Chicago
Bungalow, a one-and--half-story package of beauty,
taste, proportion and design. At mid-century,
designers Charles & Ray Eames dreamed of
affordable, high-quality mass produced housing.
Chicago had it first and best. There were 80,000
bungalows built mainly in the 1920s.
There are so many of them, one hardly notices how
inspired they are---after all, who looks a fountain on
first glance and notices an individual coin, no
matter how beautiful? It takes a second look.
More than five years after the city launched its
Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative, the homes
have been quietly slipping out of the background.
Many have become real show places, particularly on
the city's Northwest Side where property values and
personal income have allowed some owners to
undertake mindblowing restorations and rehabs.
Bungalows were built with fancy face brick, art
glass windows and loads of wood trim on the
interior. The interior layout and design was pretty
much the same, with fancier ones---and there are
thousands of those----featuring octagonal fronts,
fireplaces and Spanish tile roofs.
It was the Arts & Crafts movement brought to the
masses. But the number and similarity of the
designs riled a few neighborhoods during the
bungalow's construction heyday. The Morgan Park
Women's Club, for instance, started a "Better
Homes Week" in 1927 to protest what the Chicago
Tribune called the "peas in a pod effect" of the
look-alike bungalows.
After World War II and into the 1980s, the bungalow
held on, but were often altered with oversize
dormers or fake fronts. Doors and interior elements
were often yanked out and tossed as owners
attempted to 'modernize' their homes. The term
"bungalow belt," named for Southwest and
Northwest Side neighborhoods where the homes
were predominant, conjured images of
backward-thinking, racially-intolerant enclaves. (It
wasn't totally without reason. Martin Luther King
was hit with a brick in the Southwest Side's
Marquette Park during a march in 1966.)
But times change. The bungalow is being rethought
and preserved. Even the Postwar suburban
split-level---seen as the architectural equivalent of
crabgrass at one point in time---is cool now.
All of this brings up a mildly distressing
afterthought: Will preservationists of the future end
up rallying around the McMansion?!!?
'Observed,'
click here!