July 28, 2024 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
With their steep gables and simple details, Chicago’s workers cottages can seem today like quaint remnants from another time. Yet the cottages are in many ways the building blocks of the city’s modernity, precursors to the suburban building boom of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Built in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, workers cottages were built with technological advances that made single-family home ownership accessible for working and middle-class Chicagoans, often for the first time. And because these wood-frame homes were built outside city limits to avoid post-fire restrictions, they contributed to the eventual expansion into what are now some of Chicago’s best-known neighborhoods.
Their persistence in some places and demolition in others reflect the ongoing struggle for affordable housing (and homeownership) in the city today.
“[Workers cottages] gave an entry-level home to people that needed it,” says Matt Nardella, founder of architecture firm moss design, which has renovated workers cottages. “They were the first true housing for the middle class in the city — when there was a middle class in the city.”
“Leave a House for the Laborur”
Drawn by steel mills that opened in 1880, immigrants from Poland and beyond moved to what’s now Chicago’s far South Side, organizing communities and spurring rapid residential growth.
Closest to the mills on Lake Michigan’s shore, wood-framed cottages built by recent immigrants predominated. As these blue-collar new Americans gained a foothold and modest wealth, they gradually moved inland, building larger and more ornate bungalows, then Neo-Georgian abodes. But the wooden cottages they started out in weren’t forgotten as new waves of immigrants took their place in them.
The popularization of workers cottages required disasters as well as champagne-popping technological innovations. After fires in 1871 and 1874, the city changed its laws to ban wood houses. This spurred a cottage diaspora in surrounding townships, as many people couldn’t afford to build with more expensive brick.
Establishing post-fire homeownership for working-class immigrants was a priority for Chicago elites, an odd choice considering that one in three Chicagoans was homeless. But paternalistic city leaders saw homeownership as a civilizing and homogenizing force that could inflict respectability on the immigrant masses, pulling them away from the sordid mixing of genders, races and ethnicities that tenement living seemed to inspire.
Many decades later, William Levitt, namesake progenitor of the 20th century American suburb, declared, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist.” Relief aid societies felt that getting people back into single-family homes meant “incentives to industry and the conscious pride and independence of still living under their own roof-tree,” writes American Studies Professor Elaine Lewinnek.
But it was never hard to discern pure classism and xenophobia bred through the chaotic density of 19th century urban life. In January of 1872, thousands of German and Irish people marched to city hall to protest fire limits that barred them from rebuilding with wood, holding signs that read “No Fire Limitz at the North Site. Leave a House for the Laborur.” For this, the Chicago Tribune called them drunken “scum of the community.”
Workers cottages developers like SE Gross were happy to take these spurned homeowners in, often for $100 down, and less than $2,000 total. Ads from the 1880s (printed in English, German and Czech) boasted “OUTSIDE FIRE LIMITS! You can Build Wooden Houses! NO CITY TAXES!” These cottages were built both by small developers and large operations.
The outlying areas beyond city limits receiving these houses were eventually annexed by the city. This is where the vast majority persist today — some 57,000 strong, mostly in a band across the northwest and southwest sides, forming an inner loop to the wider, better-known “bungalow belt” that Matt Bergstrom of the Chicago Workers Cottage Initiative calls “the workers cottage waistline.” And while these neighborhoods allowed the formation of ethnic enclaves beyond the city center that are still visible today, Chicago’s elite got what they wanted: widespread homeownership, far away from their own front doors.
“An Army Tent Made Out of Wood”
Workers cottages coalesced as a coherent housing type around 1880 with the advent of standardized mass production, and persisted until about 1910, predating Chicago’s more well-known bungalows. They tend to be highly uniform. On the same narrow 25 x 125 foot lots as the bungalows, and easily identifiable by their front-facing gable, they rise 1 to 1.5 stories tall, with front doors to one side and, despite some exceptions in brick, most commonly built in wood.
Inside, the cottages were often organized as a row of larger, more public rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen) on one side, and a smaller row of private rooms (bedrooms, bathroom, study) on the other. These houses expressed a cloistered Victorian separation of spaces, and were thus less open and flowing than their successor bungalows.
Flourishes of detail are mostly superficial: Queen Anne dentils, a Flemish Gable, Italianate lintels. There are a handful of historic architect-designed high-style cottages in Chicago, but workers cottages are generally a more vernacular, utilitarian affair. “A bungalow is more designed,” says Bergstrom, co-founder of the Chicago Workers Cottage Initiative, a nonprofit organized to champion these modest homes’ history and preservation.
A key question he and co-founder Tom Vlodek have to answer is: Why are these houses less well-known than bungalows, especially considering the key role they played during the period of Chicago’s post-fire expansion, where they became the dominant form for the city’s lower and middle classes?
“They’re like city birds, little brown sparrows and finches,” says Vlodek. “They’re not colorful, they’re not flashy. They just sort of blend into the background.” Utilitarian and a bit stark, they remind him of “an army tent made out of wood.” “If you ask a kid to draw a house, they’re going to draw a workers cottage,” says Mary Marzuki, who has lived in a workers cottage since 2014.
On the Workers Cottage Initiative’s website, Bergstrom has assembled histories of several houses, including Marzuki’s in the North Side Logan Square neighborhood, built in 1885 by Norwegian immigrant Tycho Torkelson. Arriving in the US in 1881, Torkelson and his family had built a dozen or more workers cottages by 1888. Like Torkelson, the people that lived in them had jobs that were indicative of the families’ first tentative steps into middle class stability: grocer, carpenter, cigar-maker.
Although these types of houses are seen in several industrial Great Lakes cities, their affordability for people like Torkelson was driven by technology, geography and material resources that coalesced most powerfully in Chicago.
First among these was the advent of balloon framing. Previously, houses were built with heavy timber framing made of thick beams held together with hand-carved mortise and tenon joints, a method essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. But balloon framing made houses from a “cage-like framework consisting of many lightweight studs and joists rather than a few massive wooden columns and girders,” according to William Cronon’s economic history masterpiece Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
Because it was held together with nails and not handcrafted joinery, it didn’t need especially skilled labor, so a small group of builders could erect a lightweight and strong balloon framed house rapidly. This building system was also quasi-modular, and easy to expand with a floor above, or even below. Even today, it’s not uncommon to see multi-story cottages with brick on the first floor and wood framing above, evidence of an addition slotted in under the original lightweight wood-frame house. “Another family is coming over? Jack up the house, put in another floor,” says Mary Lu Seidel, a Chicago preservationist that has researched workers cottages extensively.
This building method was largely developed in Chicago because of its unique location as a continental rail hub with access to the old-growth forests of Wisconsin and Michigan. From there, logs would be felled and floated down rivers for milling along Lake Michigan in the nation’s preeminent lumber yard. According to Cronon, the lumber industry in Chicago was worth $80 million, several times more than the city had in its coffers. The expansive Illinois prairie allowed builders to expand in every direction except eastward into the lake, making for relatively modest land costs.
A Fight for Preservation
For many reasons, workers cottages are no longer the ladder to a middle-class lifestyle and security. The Workers Cottage Initiative has completed several surveys of Chicago neighborhoods, cataloguing the condition and demolition of houses in gentrifying and disinvested neighborhoods. It found that workers cottages — and middle-class standards of living — are endangered in both. But the preservation challenge varies between neighborhoods.
Citywide, for the last five years, about 100-120 workers cottages have been torn down each year. Among those that remain, many are a depreciating asset.
“We wanted to [focus on] a gentrifying, middle and disinvested neighborhood to show there’s three different solutions,” says Seidel, the preservationist, who’s participated in the Workers Cottage Initiative surveys.
In historically Latinx Logan Square, one of the city’s most recently gentrified neighborhoods, almost half of all buildings demolished between 2006 and 2020 were workers cottages. Most were replaced with larger, more expensive single-family homes. In affluent neighborhoods like this one, preservation means playing up cottages’ renovation potential for upmarket buyers.
In South Chicago, the closure of the steel mills that employed over 20,000 people at their peak has paralyzed the neighborhood with widespread disinvestment and poverty, and left many workers cottages in the throes of dereliction; 80 were issued permits for demolition between 2008 and 2022. There, broader public investment in the community is needed to deal with de-industrialization’s legacy.
In the McKinley Park neighborhood — where workers cottages on sale for $275,000 still offer a vanishingly small slice of middle-class stability — there’s been less demolition. The goal of preservationists there is helping owners to hold onto them.
Between the gentrification of Logan Square and disinvestment in South Chicago, Vlodek says preserving workers cottages is “like fighting a war on two fronts.”
In the Logan Square and Avondale neighborhoods, self-described “boutique developer” Lauren Hundman renovates workers cottageswhich typically sell for $1 million — far from affordable, but less than the $1.4 million new construction might sell for, she says.
She sees workers cottages as small, ideal city houses that serve a sub-luxury niche. Americans are having smaller families and say they’re interested in smaller carbon and material footprints. The workers cottage can complement both, with an average two to three bedrooms and a floorplan rarely extending beyond 2,500 square feet. “People need to think more creatively about using what we have rather than getting out the wrecking ball and maximizing every dollar on every piece of land,” says Hudman.
The Age of Displacement
Ultimately her renovations are wrapping these values of sustainable urban living in a package that nonetheless facilitates gentrification and the displacement of Black, Brown and poor Chicagoans. There’s been an exodus of 30% of Logan Square’s Latinx population, 11,000 people, between 2010 and 2020.
This is what Lucy Gomez-Feliciano, community engagement director at Here to Stay Community Land Trust, is trying to deal with. She purchased a workers cottage in Logan Square in 1996, for approximately $110,000. A few years ago, her next-door neighbor sold their workers cottage for $660,000. It was torn down to build luxury condos, each selling for bit less than $1 million, she says. The vast majority of people getting home loans to move into the neighborhood are white. “Most of those are developers,” she says.
Working in four neighborhoods where workers cottages are common, including Logan Square, Here to Stay serves families with low to moderate incomes, up to 120% of the area median income. The nonprofit purchases land and leases it to homeowners, who then only have to purchase (and pay taxes on) the house itself. They ask for a 1-3% down payment, and their average home costs $275,000.
Gomez-Feliciano wants to see more policies that support affordable homeownership, and higher levels of up-front subsidy like down payment assistance. “Not that there is ever enough, but there is more government support for building rental units and there are very limited resources to subsidize work like ours that [focuses on] permanent ownership,” she says.
These sorts of policies are what’s required to put the workers cottage in Chicago back in its historic role as entry-level wealth builder. “[Workers Cottages] were independence,” says Marzuki. “They probably looked around and said, ‘This is all I need.’ And this is all I need.”