Bungalow Style: Brick, Stucco, Framed Craftsmen
If Chicago had a brand, it wouldn’t be the Willis (Sears) Tower, the 110-story skyscraper that, for some 25 years, maintained its status as the world’s tallest. It would be the signature Chicago Bungalow. This distinctive housing style was the cornerstone of the city’s working-class homeowners who had always made up the fabric of the city.
With approximately 80,000 bungalows built in the city between 1910 and 1940, the Chicago Bungalow was a distinct housing style unlike bungalows built anywhere else in the country. Today they still constitute nearly one-third of Chicago’s single-family housing stock.
Developed to solve urban housing shortages, these modest, yet durable one-and-a-half story brick and limestone homes were the first in the city to offer the masses modern amenities like central heating, electricity and plumbing. All came in a package of architectural artistry featuring recessed front doors, wide front porches, stained glass windows, arched elements, wood trim, and built-ins.
The Chicago Bungalow today is a most sought-after home, but it wasn’t also so. After World War II, ranches and split levels became the country’s dominant housing types. The bungalow sank in popularity. Seen as too small, out-of-date and unsupportive of modern family life, people began tearing them down. Alarmed, Mayor Richard M. Daley created the Historic Chicago Bungalow Association (HCBA) in 2000 and set out to change that perception. A “Bungalow Belt” was established to identify where the greatest concentration of traditional Chicago Bungalow homes were located. HCBA began offering grants to help homeowners adapt these unique and historic dwellings by upgrading their plumbing, windows, and heating units while providing guidance for expansions both up and down. The goal was to make the dwellings more energy efficient while supplementing living space without compromising stylistic integrity.
In 2017 the group simplified its name to Chicago Bungalow Association (CBA) and opened its membership to all vintage single-family homeowners in the city (for homes that were built at least 50 years ago). While its educational programs and resources are now available to all homeowners of historic Chicago detached homes, CBA’s mission still focuses on the archetypical brick-and-stone Chicago Bungalow as found in the Bungalow Belt.
Although Gladstone Park makes much of its hundreds of brick Chicago Bungalows, they are interspersed between older Dutch Colonials and foursquares, English Tudors and Georgians, and later Craftsman (framed) bungalows, Cape Cods and ranches. The community and its great neighborhood of Jefferson Park just missed making the cut for inclusion in the Bungalow Belt as shown on the map below.
Gladstone Park may have the most diverse selection of architectural styles in Chicago, which is one reason why—even though it boasts hundreds of brick bungalows—the Chicago Bungalow Association excludes the Far Northwest Side community from its gold crescent-shaped officially-designated Chicago Bungalow Belt on its map of the city. (Gladstone Park, on the very edge of the Belt, is outlined in red, the “V” section in the blue greater Jefferson Park neighborhood with its western section extending into what some people regard as Norwood Park.) Rather than being concentrated on every street, bungalows built in the traditional Chicago brick form in Gladstone Park are interspersed here…three on one block, ten on another… in between older Dutch Colonials and Foursquares as well as English Tudors and Georgians, Craftsman (frame) Bungalows, Cape Cods and ranches. Map by the Chicago Bungalow Association with communities delineated by Mina.
Still, the influence of bungalows in Gladstone Park is not to be ignored. For we can’t talk about bungalows in Gladstone Park without talking about the American Dream. It was what lit a fire in European peasants who had been excluded from bettering their lives by the economic and social class structure of the Old World, luring millions to our shores and to Chicago in particular. Immigrants came not only to seek basic human freedoms they had never had, but also for the opportunity to achieve what had previously been impossible for them to do in the lands where they had been born. In countries where only the eldest son could inherit property, America opened doors for those thrown off the land they grew up on. Besides gaining access to new jobs and educational opportunities in this country, they also sought the previously-unimaginable goal to own their own homes.
The American bungalow was the first affordable, quality house style that made the American dream possible. Particularly drawn to the home design were Polish immigrants who had long sought sanctuary in Chicago in large numbers. At first clustering in the area that came to be known as “Polish Downtown,” centered at the intersection of W. Division and N. Milwaukee some eight miles south of Gladstone Park, the Poles began spreading outward as their financial circumstances improved. In the city’s northwest where their money went farther, they found they could jumpstart making their dreams into realities with bungalows all their own.
With their influx into the neighborhood’s bungalows, Polish influence in Gladstone Park grew and continues to be strong as you will see in the Community section. Even today, Polish is the third most widely-spoken language in Chicago, after English and Spanish. The Windy City still has the largest population of Poles outside of the mother country.
As the “everyman” house, the sturdy bungalow that became popular during the first two decades of the 20th Century offered formal living and dining rooms, a full working kitchen, and two bedrooms flanking a bath. Generous-sized for its time, it was part of the modern movement toward bigger accommodations. Its main level floor plan typically ranged between 800 and 1300 square feet, fitting perfectly on the 25- to 35-foot wide city lots of Chicago (and Gladstone Park) developments.
Chicago bungalow design was largely influenced the the Prairie School architecture associated with Frank Lloyd Wright who had his major studio in Oak Park, just west of the city. As such, the homes were affordable with purposeful amenities such as built-ins that distinguished them from European designs. Except for a handful of flat-roofed models, they had half-stories upstairs under hip roofs with front-facing dormer windows that made them ideal for expansion. They also had full basements and modern services such as hot water heat, city water and sewer, and electric wiring.
It so happened that when Sears Kit Homes were proliferating across America, bungalows were one of its most popular offerings. In fact, bungalows dominated the nation’s mail order market by 1915. This is true whether the homes were from Sears, undoubtedly the largest such company, or lesser recognized companies like R.I. Kenyon, which specialized in the “Take Down Home,” a portable bungalow that could be assembled and disassembled at vacation retreats. Undoubtedly there are at least a few bungalows constructed from these kits in Gladstone Park, but little has yet been done to try to determine exactly where and how many there might be. Official Sears Kit Homes researchers discuss being hamstrung by the way Cook County indexes its properties, preventing them from doing mass lookups for them like they can do in other Illinois counties.
Homeowners who wish to explore whether they might be living in a Sears Kit Home are advised to start their searches with visual inspections, comparing their houses with illustrations from the book Houses by Mail by Stevenson and Jandl. Cumulating what was offered by Sears from its 44-page Kit Home Catalog of 1908 all the way up to the 146-page 1918 Kit Home Catalog and beyond, this book is considered the master tome of all such “instant homes.” Homeowners can also try to track down original building permits, as they would often mark a house as a Sears product or list it under the name of a Sears Kit architect, authenticating their quest. If the title transfers they find for the property at the Records Office yield the names of Walker O. Lewis or E Harrison Powell, it indicates the original owner received financing for their kit through Sears Roebuck. Additional information on such a search may be sourced from SearsHouses.com with links to various blogs.
Although Sears’ all-in-one concept was tempting for prospective homeowners eager to build modest bungalows on their own lots in Gladstone Park, most people here picked out plans supplied by house design companies recommended by their builders. The difference in approach was that while Sears shipped the components to build entire dwellings directly to a homeowner’s lot (including numbered lumber pieces, doors, windows, bathroom fixtures and kitchen counters), companies like William A. Radford provided the blueprints only. So while people who chose the Sears Kit Home paid upfront for all building and finishing materials before the company shipped everything to them on huge pallets via rail and truck, those who bought blueprints had more time to plan, budget and even make alterations as they were overseeing construction. So while people contracting for Sears Kit Homes knew exactly what they were going to end up with–no substitutions!–clients of Radford and other architectural firms had more ability to design one-of-a-kind homes with larger kitchens or wider front porches, say, as well as handpick different materials for more custom touches.
In 1925 William A. Radford began offering a 30-foot by 51-foot brick bungalow design with five rooms and bath called The Gladstone. It is unknown whether any Radford Gladstones were built in Gladstone Park…or if Radford even knew there was a Gladstone Park community in Chicago.
Stucco Bungalows were the first permutation of these modest, compact homes built in Gladstone Park (between 1900 to 1919), a few with red or green tile roofs. Some of these are built in the Detroit style with taller gable, not hip, roofs.
When the 1920s came along, the distinctly Chicago Brick Bungalow emerged. Constructed of locally-sourced materials, it had double-thick brick walls for superior insulation and fireproof abilities. The majority of models were designed with limestone accents and massive front masonry steps leading up to entry doors accessible from half or full-width columned porches. An alternate style had its entry door at ground level halfway down the side of the house with interior stairs leading up to a central hall on its main level, allowing for a massive living room spanning the full width at the front of the house with solid walls of windows facing the street.
In fact, windows everywhere were generous, often in clusters of two, three, or more to let in natural light. More expensive models were not just larger, but had more elaborate windows, sometimes with art (stained leaded) glass, built into half-hexagonal living room extensions. Art glass could sometimes also be found in narrow closet windows, even though most closet windows were formed of unopenable glass block. Bathrooms routinely had glass block windows built high up on the wall over the bathtub, sometimes with a central screened section that could be opened for ventilation.
Arched front doors, elliptical front basement windows, built-in window boxes and imposing tapered porch columns were some of the other special features of bungalows for those who could afford the bells and whistles.
In the Gladstone Park developments, like almost everywhere, there are only a dozen or so basic bungalow designs. But you’d never know it, for builders deliberately varied the façade of every single one of them so that each was distinct unto itself. No cookie cutters here! Look at the photographs to see how masons used face (fancy) brick of multiple colors and styles on their fronts, integrating patterns with decorative stone accents to create distinctively different appearances even on houses with the same exterior structural design.
At the same time brick bungalows were multiplying in Gladstone Park, the more modestly-priced Frame Craftsman Bungalows that otherwise looked similar were also being built in the community. Because they were meant to hunker down onto a landscape of cold winters with abundant snow, their basic wood-clad shapes were boxier with fewer flourishes than those of their Chicago brick cousins. In this way they were also radically different from the California craftsman style bungalows with all their exterior decorative details such as exposed rafters and pilastered front porches.
For more on how Gladstone Park’s standout stock of homes were built and serve to enhance residential life in the neighborhoods, see Early Development and Vintage Home Living.
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