Gladstone Park’s Early Development
It is difficult to trace the old subdivisions built in Gladstone Park without physical access to old building plans from Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development. Few major Chicago newspapers discussed growth on the Far Northwest side when it was happening unless an exceptional event occurred. Most small community newspapers that did publish articles about growth are hard to locate due to loss and the limited number of places where old issues have been gathered and housed. The Northwest Chicago Historical Society, which attempts to keep history alive in the wider Far Northwest Side of the city, is particularly hampered in its research by the fact that no old hyperlocal newspapers have been digitized.
However, we can get some idea of how the community’s residential areas grew by examining advertisements placed in area publications by developers aiming to sell land and houses. Their focus was on getting the attention of (mostly) first-time homeowners eager to buy lots and/or ready-built dwellings by offering attractive financial terms. Several of these were found in both English and Polish Chicago newspapers published in the Gladstone Park area from the first decades of the 20th Century. Some of the real estate opportunities were marketed directly by developers and others were promoted and sold by realty companies, just as they are today.
Many of the subdivisions in Northwest Chicago, including Gladstone Park, were platted by Polish-immigrant-turned-property-developer William Zelosky. His penchant for investing significant chunks of money into the infrastructure of the communities he was building to make them “high class” and desirable places to live, as detailed by the book The Chicago Bungalow by Dominic A. Pacyga & Charles Shanabruch (Chicago Architecture Foundation, 2003) strongly influenced the end result. Instead of just plunking houses down, Zelosky had a holistic infrastructure plan. His improvements included wide paved roads, cement curbs, sidewalks, sewers, water and gas mains, electrical service, and provisions for parklands. Sometimes he even added decorative entry gates and architectural monuments.
One of the earliest ads discovered named 8 developments Zelosky had in the works by 1924, including subdivisions in Jefferson Park and Gladstone Park, from Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1924. It is displayed below:
[move up ad from the bottom of this section titled “Best Investment in the World” to here]
At his zenith, Zelosky had eight offices on the Northwest Side, including four on N. Milwaukee Avenue, as documented by Pacyga and Shanabruch. The subdivisions were built to target different markets, but all had a few aspects in common. He made sure that all his properties had access to good transportation while providing favorable financing to make it easier for people to buy into his communities. With banks of the era typically still requiring a stunning 50% down for first mortgages, his privately-funded payment plans were instrumental in making it possible for many working-class Americans who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it to become homeowners for the first time.
Gladstone Gardens, Zelosky’s first big venture in Gladstone Park was located in the extreme southern part of the community. By the first decade of the 20th Century, many German immigrants had already been attracted to the area, building the barn-roof style Dutch (“Deutsch”) Colonial Revivals from their homeland that they favored. When the subdivision began attracting Polish immigrants in the 1920s and early 1930s, architectural styles changed as they tended to contract for sturdy and affordable brick bungalows that were then in vogue.
Two ads for Gladstone Gardens lots in the extreme southern section of Gladstone Park are below. They were printed in the Polish language newspaper Dztennik Chicagoski (Chicago Daily News), February 27 and March 6, 1915, both from Library of Congress. When English Tudor revivals became desirable in the 1940s, they filled in Gladstone Gardens’ remaining vacant lots, leading to a neighborhood with three distinct styles of architecture. Notice the different financial terms offered by Schultz, Baker & Co. for the 30×125-foot lots, which is the standard for the community.
[move up the two ads as we had together titled Kupno 1 Spizedaz and Zawiadomienie to here]
Park View Crest, Zelosky’s more ambitious 500-lot subdivision on 60 acres overlooking the Edgebrook Golf Course just south of W. Devon, was marketed in the 1920s to people seeking a more suburban-like community with adjacent parkland and open space. While bungalows were built in the beginning, housing tastes shifted in the 1930s and 1940s when this area became home to perhaps the largest stock of English Tudor Revivals in Chicago. Later yet, more minimalistic English Georgians were built on remaining lots in the subdivision, making that English style the third most abundant kind of residential architecture in Gladstone Park.
This ad for Park View Crest appeared in (Chicago) Daily Tribune, May 31, 1924. The developer used the tract’s advantageous location bordering on the Edgebrook Golf Course (and adjacent property that became the Forest Preserves of Cook County) to market its homesites east of N. Milwaukee all the way north to W. Devon. Because housing trends were changing during the latter part of this decade and into the 1930s, many homebuyers in this development pulled away from wanting the low-slung bungalows and contracted for bigger and more elaborate steep-roofed English architectural designs with all their decorative elements, particularly in the northern section near the most desirable parkland. The result was a Gladstone Park with perhaps the largest collection of brick-and-stone English Tudor Revivals in Chicago, followed to a lesser extent by the still desired bungalow, plainer two-story brick English Georgian Revivals, and a smattering of other styles.
[Move up ad titled “Zelosky’s Park View Crest” here]
Widely regarded as a visionary, Zelosky implemented what he called “careful zoning,” separating homes from apartments and businesses, a concept that then was before its time. It ensured his developments would be family-friendly and remain desirable through the decades, according to the September 28, 1926 Westchester Tribune article detailing his philosophy in Tells Dream of Ideal Community as reprinted on the Franzosenbusch Heritage Project (go to links for entire article).
With one of his offices on the edge of the development’s borders at 6105 N. Milwaukee, Zelosky’s company was in the perfect place to promote these properties. No building at that office location remains today, but its coordinates position it in the area of Chopin Plaza not far from today’s McDonalds Restaurant where N. Milwaukee merges with N. Elston.
Reading the ads for Zelosky’s Gladstone Park developments gives a good sense of the features he and other topnotch builders were touting 100 years ago in order to attract buyers.
It is unknown exactly when Zelosky began putting in the sidewalks and other infrastructure improvements to pave the way for Park View Crest. But for the first time in this, his most upscale development, he left “cornerstones” at various borders identifying his company as the subdivider. Perhaps as a statement, he didn’t merely stamp his company name into the sidewalk, the minimum required by the city of Chicago of all concrete companies. Instead, he embedded stately brass William Zelosky & Co. plaques.
Without a development map, it is difficult to know exactly where Zelosky’s Gladstone Gardens ended and the later Park View Crest homes “overlooking Edgebrook Golf Course” (now in the Cook County Forest Preserve) began. But since N. Catalpa delineated the northern edge of the earlier framed houses that were built in Gladstone Gardens west across N. Milwaukee, it’s a good guess that N. Catalpa to its east was Park View Crest’s southern border. Especially since the southernmost brass development plaque Zelosky embedded that still exists is in the sidewalk there on the corner of N. Catalpa and N. Parkside.
As far as is known currently, there are at least sixteen other brass sidewalk plaques on on the northern side of the community’s sidewalks within the Park View Crest development. Most are located on corners opposite the highly touted golf course/park, some of which are pictured below (photos by Mina). Their conditions vary from being in remarkably good shape, their gleaming surfaces weathered to an attractive blue-green patina, to others showing their age.
The southernmost Gladstone Gardens Development plaque (above) can be seen in an older unattributed cement sidewalk block at the northwest corner of W. Catalpa and N. Parkside.
Two other plaques (above) can be found perpendicular to each other at the corner of N Merrimac and N. Raven, preserved for posterity when they were re-embedded in new concrete sidewalks installed in 2021 by G&V Construction Company, Chicago.
[McVicker Ave plaque.png, Indian Road plaque 1.png, Mead Ave plaque.png, and Indian Road plaque 2.png here IN THAT ORDER.]
Several other plaques are in pairs perpendicular to each other on the very northern border of Zelosky’s Park View Crest development overlooking the golf course/parkland starting on the corner of N. McVicker and Indian Road and going west. Many of these were reset in new concrete sidewalks installed in 2021 by KS Energy Services, Chicago. Interestingly, the plaque identifying Meade Avenue is mistakenly spelled “Mead,” proving that subcontractors in the old days made just as many (en)grave(ing) mistakes as they do today…pun intended.
Even though G&V Construction and KS Energy Services preserved the brass Zelosky sidewalk plaques, other concrete contractors may not have been as cognizant of the worth of the historic plaques, as they are absent in sidewalks installed by other companies on some corners where they would otherwise be expected to be. There is apparently no law on Chicago’s books saying they must be reset in new sidewalks, so it falls upon locals to try to see they are preserved.
Although many of the original sidewalks have been replaced in Gladstone Park, the sections that remain hold further clues as to its residential development. Halfway up the west side of the 5500 block of N. Parkside from the Catalpa plaque, for example, is a contiguous run of paired numbers (49/50, 47/48, 45/46) stamped into the oldest sections of sidewalk. The speculation is that these identified the common borders of adjacent lot numbers for Zelosky’s development. One of these pairs is pictured below.
Three pairs of numbers (49/50, 47/48, 45/46) can be seen stamped on the edges of the oldest sidewalks halfway up the 5500 block of N. Parkside from the Catalpa plaque. The speculation is that the paired numbers originally identified lot numbers for the Gladstone Gardens development. Most of the adjacent sidewalks have been replaced since, obliterating other evidence. Photo by author.
As other old sidewalks eroded down, progressively revealing more and more of their gravel substrate, they often cracked and then broke apart. On the Far Northwest Side in the latter half of the 20th Century Chicago Cement Contractor H. Kilian put his specialized skills into action. Sidewalks replaced and identified by the Kilian stamp some 50 years ago are still found in many northwest areas of the city from Albany Park to Gladstone Park and beyond. Despite how prolific this particular cement contractor was, no current information could be located about the H. Kilian business beyond his stamped phone number SP[ring] 7-4749, following the convention of the time when the first two digits of telephone exchanges in local areas represented a two-letter abbreviation for a word. Further research yielded the modern reiteration of the phone number (773) 777-4749 as a landline assigned to a home in Chicago’s Norwood Park neighborhood just on the edge of the suburban community of Niles that had once been owned by a Kilian family member. Below is a photo of some of H. Kilian’s work on N. Mango Avenue in Gladstone Park, noted as completed in 1971.
[kilian sidewalk.png here]
