BUILDINGS LOST TO TIME CODE

“We cannot, and should not, sit idly by while a treasure of Rogers Park gets demolished to be turned into another empty, gravel lot,” Kaempen wrote in the petition. building to keep it standing and restore it - mostly because of its decades-old original terra cotta. The petition, created by resident Brian Kaempen, urges community Moore, Gassman and others associated with the 1218-20 W. Gassman formerly owned SPIN nightclub in Boystown and owns residential properties in Rogers Park. “I own the property … if someone else wanted to save the building, they should have bought the building,” owner David Gassman said. Linze Rice of DNAinfo wrote about efforts to save it and the owner’s reaction to community efforts to preserve it:Ī petition signed by over 160 supporters emerged this week to “save” the Morseland building from demolition - though the property’s owner and the alderman said the effort is misguided. Morse came down after a long period of vacancy. Morseland Building The 1925 Morseland Building 1218-1220 W. What’s more, the area is just outside of the historic districts in the Gold Coast and Old Town Triangle-meaning it’s much easier to demolish existing buildings and erect megamansions.

BUILDINGS LOST TO TIME CODE

In the 1950s, the City Council designated these eastern blocks as R5, later revised to RM4.5-a residential code that allows multiunit buildings and thus bigger structures. By contrast, west of Halsted, houses max out at 38 feet and a 1.2 floor-area ratio. In this section of Lincoln Park, regulations allow houses to reach 47 feet high and have a floor-area ratio (the amount of floor surface allowed in relation to the size of the lot) of 1.7. So why the concentration of so much wealth there? It’s all because of a decades-old change in zoning laws. In 2014, Ian Spula of Chicago magazine explained why this area is home to so many massive teardowns: Orchard Street fell victim to another mega-mansion replacement project in Lincoln Park. Michael has been documenting Chicago’s remaining original Worker’s Cottages since 2014 in his Flickr collection. They can be found in almost every neighborhood of the city, and associate editor Gabriel X. Most Worker’s Cottages are a simplified version of the prevailing style of the era, Italianate, and are often identified by their large doorways and window hoods with incised geometric designs, curves, or flowers.

Speculators and new residents alike target them for teardowns, often replacing them with larger single family housing. Many of Chicago’s extant stock of Worker’s Cottages are of close proximity to downtown with easy access to transit. These modest homes typically consist of one and a half floors, with a front facing gable with window. The Worker’s Cottage is one of the earliest forms of industrialized housing, utilizing factory-produced construction components and marketed toward the working class. Instead, we’ll look at the patterns of what we lost – and a few wins, too. The entirety of architecture lost in 2016 is sadly too much to detail here. It wasn’t all losses in 2016–there were a few wins, particularly neglected or damaged churches that will live on through adaptive reuse. But there were a few themes in the destruction of Chicago’s architectural heritage: late 19th century Worker’s Cottages, grand South Side homes, Italianate row houses, and a few sparkling Victorians on the North Side.

Last year this cycle repeated largely as it has in years past. In times of wealth and prosperity the number of construction and demolition permits grow, and in times of recession they dwindle.

Every year brings new buildings and the demolition of others–it’s the continuous cycle that transforms inanimate structures into the growing and evolving organism of a city.

Buildings lost to time