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.