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(More customer reviews)"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.
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The Chicago Bungalow is more than a housing style indigenous to the city. It epitomizes Chicago's work ethic and its rewards for successive waves of ethnic newcomers to the city since the early 20th century. In this book, the Chicago Architecture Foundation interprets both the design and the meaning of these homes, in keeping with CAF's mission to raise awareness of Chicago's architectural legacy.ÝÝAfter 1915, new neighborhoods appeared across the prairie. The Chicago-style bungalow came to both dominate and symbolize these areas. A one and one-half story single-family freestanding home, it included such conveniences as electricity, indoor plumbing, and central heat. Chicagoans built some 80,000 bungalows. Another 20,000 were built in suburban Cook County. Nearly every ethnic and racial group in the area has made its way at one time or another to the Bungalow Belt. Today the Bungalow Belt includes white ethnic, African American, Latino, and Asian families. ÝÝ
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