Astor Historic District

After a short break, I took off again around 4:00 pm, and walked up Michigan Avenue towards the Astor Historic District.  In 1882, Potter Palmer (who almost single-handedly developed downtown State Street) and his fashionable wife Bertha shocked their wealthy neighbors in the south-side neighborhood of Prairie Avenue when they moved north of the river to what would become known as the Gold Coast.  At that time, their mansion was in the middle of nowhere.  But other members of the Chicago elite soon followed, including some members of the Astor family.  Today, many of the lavish but landlocked mansions remain, surrounded by high-rise apartments and hotels.

As a side note, patriarch John Jacob Astor made much of his early money on the fur trade, and in 1811 sent an expedition to the northern Pacific Coast.  They built a fort at the mouth of the Columbia River, which later became the town of Astoria, Oregon.

Charnley House

One of the more architecturally significant homes is the 1892 Charnley House (now known as the Charnley-Persky House), designed by Louis Sullivan and his chief draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright.  The three-story brick and limestone house showed early signs of Wright’s Prairie School architecture, and was an early step towards modern residential architecture.

Edward P. Russell House

This house was designed in 1929 by Holabird and Root in the Art Deco style.

Other houses

Old Town

After walking along Astor Street and nearby, I headed west towards Old Town.  Despite the name, at the time of the Great Chicago Fire the area was just pasture.  Soon after the fire, however, thousands of displaced German immigrants moved in.  Much of the neighborhood has gentrified over the years.

In the 1950’s, the Chicago Housing Authority cleared out the Italian slum in the southwest corner of Old Town and built twenty-five high-rise apartment buildings.  Cabrini Green quickly gained infamy as one of the most dangerous places in the country, rife with gang violence, drugs, and squalor.  For Clive Barker fans, it was the setting of the 1992 horror film Candyman.  The contrast has always been particularly stark between Cabrini Green and the nearby wealth of the Gold Coast.  In fact, the poor, mostly-unemployed, primarily African American residents of Cabrini Green (at one time numbering 15,000) were nearly surrounded by upper middle class and upper class whites.  After decades of letting this failed public housing project linger on, the CHA is now tearing down the towers in favor of new “mixed-income” developments, with the rich and poor living side-by-side in peace and harmony.  Am I the only person that has no faith in such experiments?  I think the simple fact that the architects and planners who come up with these things don’t actually live in them is a sure sign of eventual failure.  My prediction is that ten years from now, there will be no poor people in Cabrini Green.

Despite the recent attempts to rescue Cabrini Green from disaster, my guidebook advised to steer well clear just the same.  In my wanderings through the eastern fringe of the Gold Coast though, I strayed close enough to have one rather uncomfortable encounter.  As I walked down Wells Street, a man stopped me on the sidewalk to ask for money.  In my previous encounters with homeless beggars (far fewer than in Portland, and no gutter punks), they sat quietly on street corners jingling their cups of change.  This man, who was clearly not homeless, launched into his sob story of trying to feed his wife and little girl, complete with details about the specific amount he would need in order to add Hamburger Helper and other ingredients.  When I told him “Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me” (obviously, I was lying), his expression became very serious and cold.  While I had sometimes felt a little uneasy riding the L trains, this was the only time during my visit to Chicago when I was seriously concerned for my safety.  I slowly began to walk down the sidewalk, and after a moment he continued on the other way.  I quickened my pace, and at the next major intersection, turned back east.  Soon I was walking past the historic homes again, and then down Michigan Avenue to the hotel.