The Chicago Bungalow

"The Chicago Bungalow" is a collection of essays created as a companion volume to a Chicago Architectural Foundation exhibition staged in connection with the City's Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative, which provides financing and other incentives to help bungalow owners improve and maintain their homes and communities. To this day, the bungalows themselves are an important part of Chicago's architectural heritage and the neighborhoods that grew up around them are part of what makes Chicago such a liveable city.Although sponsored by an architectural organization, this book emphasizes social history rather than aesthetic appreciation. There is one brief essay on the characteristics of the bungalow (i.e., what is a bungalow and what, if anything, sets Chicago bungalows apart from those found in other areas of the country), but most of the rest of the text addresses how the various areas were developed by real estate tycoons and others, how bungalows were built and financed, how the modern conveniences they contained affected the lives of women, which social groups bought bungalows (interestingly, the non-Chicago authors seem to think these were middle class neighborhoods, while the Chicago authors mostly characterize them as working class), the social organizations of one bungalow community (Portage Park), and how neighborhoods have changed (primarily racially) over the years. (The latter essay mostly glosses over Chicago's sad history of segregation, racism, block busting and white flight.) I found the information on the "own your own home" movement (a relatively recent part of the American dream) and on the standardization of plumbing fixtures and non-standarization of wood trim particularly interesting. Black-and-white pictures throughout the book more or less illustrate the text (sometimes the connection is not obvious) and there is a 16-page section of color photos illustrating the diversity of forms and some of the decorative features of Chicago bungalows.I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the origins of this housing form and how it affected the lives of working class Chicagoans. If your interest is confined to the aesthetic aspects of bungalows, however, this will not add much to what you already know.

Nice book on Chicago's own bungalow tradition. Nice pictures of not only classic Chicago bungalows, but of many of it's inhabitants in the great Chicago Bungalow Belt. Only wish the book was longer and had more color photos, but it does show examples of my favorite part of the Chicago bungalows from the 1920's, art glass. They will NEVER build houses like these again. Attention to the Southside as well as the Northside belts. Recommended reading for us lay people who love Chicago's unique brick bungalows.