In Chicago, the bungalow is a state of mind-an idea, a symbol, a trophy, a style, an approach to life.
It is also the stolid, low-to-the-ground, single-family house, most often of brick, that has been the home of millions of Chicagoans and suburbanites over the last century. It’s a housing style that has helped define the city and, in its way, form Chicago.
Say the word: bungalow. It is a rare term, with its curious mix of vowels and its particular fit of consonants.
“It bounces out of the mouth and rolls off the tongue in a pleasant, happy sort of way,” writes John Brinkman, publisher of American Bungalow, a slick California-based magazine dedicated to praising the bungalow’s virtues.
But the word can also be said with a smirk, as when architects dismiss the bungalow as “the least house for the most money.” And it can be said in derision, as when Woodrow Wilson belittled Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge’s ideas by calling him “bungalow-minded.”
In Chicago, it is a word heavy with meanings, and rarely treated with disdain.
“For most of us, living in a bungalow was a step up. It was like winning a medal,” explains Paul Green, who grew up in an Albany Park bungalow and now teaches political science at Governors State University in south suburban University Park. “You had your own little lawn. You could plant your own tomatoes.”
Indeed, over the years the bungalow was home to so many Chicagoans that it has achieved the level of cultural icon, as important to the mental landscape of the city as it was to its physical geography.
When William Lipinski was in a heated congressional race against Marty Russo a few years ago, he mailed to voters photos of his Southwest Side bungalow and of Russo’s Tudor-style home in the suburbs. The message was clear: Lipinski was a man of the people; Russo, in his non-bungalow, someone putting on airs.
It was not for nothing that Mayor Richard J. Daley made his home in a Bridgeport bungalow. Or that his son, Richard M., the family’s second mayor, lived in a similar home a few blocks away. It was only after four years of consolidating his power as mayor that Daley the son felt comfortable enough to move from Bridgeport to an upscale Central Station rowhouse not far from the lake.
There has always been a touch of innocence equated with bungalows in Chicago, something cocoon-like. That’s what made the Schuessler-Peterson case so shocking in 1955. The three boys-14-year-old Robert Peterson and his friends, John and Anton Schuessler, 13 and 11-were from “good families.” You could tell that because they lived in a Northwest Side bungalow community. Their parents were solid citizens, as solid as those bungalows, not riffraff. So, when the boys disappeared and two days later their naked bodies were discovered in a forest preserve-they had been strangled-there was an acute sense of violation and even despair.
More than a few people think mass murderer John Wayne Gacy lived in a bungalow. He didn’t. His home on Summerdale Avenue was a brick-fronted suburban ranch house. But the confusion is understandable. Just as the Chicago bungalow evolved from the 19th Century worker’s cottage (and a multitude of other influences), the ranch is a descendant of the bungalow.
Gacy’s home–under which the bodies of many of his victims were found in December 1978–was small and compact, like a bungalow. It was one-story and had a sloping roof, like a bungalow. And it was on the far fringe of a vast expanse of bungalows: tens of thousands of them, covering the entire Northwest Side of the city. Chicago has two such immense fields of bungalows; the other blankets the Far Southwest and South Sides, as prairie grasses once clothed the plains.
Mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana lived in a bungalow, and it was in the basement kitchen of his bungalow in 1975 that he died, shot once in the mouth and five times in the neck. But what a bungalow. If Gacy lived in a bungalow-like ranch house, Giancana’s home was a mansion-like bungalow. Sure, it was a one-story structure with bedrooms in the attic and a finished basement. But it sat massive and brooding-its interior opulently furnished-on a quiet side street at the south end of Oak Park. And it was servants who lived in the attic.
The Chicago bungalow has come to mean so many things, to symbolize so much, because it is an amazingly nebulous form of architecture. (Giancana’s imposing home was as much a bungalow as the humblest stucco structure next to former farmhouses in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood.)
Bungalows can be found throughout the world, but few look like the squat, solid, fortress-like bungalows so ubiquitous in Chicago and its suburbs. Indeed, so many different types, styles, forms and sizes of housing have been called bungalows since the term first came into use 300 years ago that sociologist-historian Anthony D. King writes in “The Bungalow” (Oxford University Press), “For the purpose of this book, a bungalow is defined as a dwelling form known by the term ‘bungalow.’ “
In other words, “bungalow” is as much-perhaps even more-an idea as a thing. Over its history and across the continents, King notes, a bungalow has been defined at times by its function, such as a summer home; at other times, by its manner of construction, such as being simply built; and, at still other times, by its location, such as in the country.
The bungalow began as a native home and was adapted by empire-builders for their own housing. The word was first used in India for an airy, one-story peasant’s hut in rural Bengal. Later, it came to refer to a house for Europeans there, and, through the spread of the British Empire, it was a housing form (and an idea) that ended up on every continent-and became a worldwide symbol of British imperialism.
In the United States, the first structure to be called a bungalow was a sprawling, two-and-a-half-story summer home, built on a grand scale, with a large wraparound veranda and a complicated floor plan. It was constructed on Cape Cod in 1879, and shared very little with the typical narrow-lot Chicago bungalow that would come 40 years later.
Early American bungalows often featured traditional architectural styles imposed on the vague bungalow form. Thus, there were Queen Anne bungalows and Mission Style bungalows as well as Spanish Colonial, Pueblo, Log Cabin and American Colonial ones.
What linked these bungalows together was less their look-they often appeared quite dissimilar-than the idea of simplicity behind them. They were a reaction to the pretensions and clutter of Victorian architecture.
The word “bungalow” itself played a role in the dwelling form’s increasing popularity, becoming identified with a comfortable coziness and an informal homeyness. There was also something just a tad exotic about it–“the same sort of charm,” a turn-of-the-century commentator noted, “as the word ‘Mesopotamia’ to a lady in Maine.”
More Top Picks What Evaluations Should Be In A Dyslexia Iep
One of the ironies of bungalow history-and more evidence of its complicated role as a social concept-is that, initially, the late 19th Century bungalow in England and America was seen as a country home, an embodiment of the back-to-nature movement, a rejection of the city and its crowding. Then, with the turn of the century, it was reincarnated as the ultimate city and suburban home.
The mechanism was a combination of explosive population growth, standardization of construction materials and techniques, the rise of the automobile and an aggressive army of builder-developers. The idea was to bring the country home with its airiness and greenery into the city for everyday living.
This metamorphosed bungalow, contractor-built rather than architect-designed, became a single-family home that middle-class and even lower-middle-class families could afford. And one that provided more than simply shelter.
The American bungalow craze started in California and spread throughout the nation during the first three decades of this century. While bungalows can be found today in virtually every corner of the country, nowhere are they more numerous than in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The California-style bungalow, which is often seen as the progenitor of all other mass-produced bungalows, is a one- or one-and-a-half-story structure, as much wide as long, on a large lot. A frame house with wood or stucco siding, it usually features an open-air porch where family members can enjoy the cool of an evening in the balmy California climate.
The Chicago bungalow is a much different animal-sturdier and more self-contained, more rooted, less flighty. The weather, of course, is part of the explanation. The Chicago bungalow is faced with brick, the better to withstand Midwestern winters. Its front porch is often purely vestigial, just a simple landing where a visitor can stand out of the rain or snow while waiting for someone to answer the door. Inside, as a buffer between the weather and the living space, there is a vestibule where coats and boots are put on or taken off.
And it is built on a long, narrow lot, often no wider than 35 feet. Its eaves can’t project too far out on the side without hitting the bungalow next door. So, by necessity, it has to be more rectangular in character. But, as a consolation prize, the Chicago bungalow, unlike its California cousin, has a full basement-in fact, a lower-level second story, often with a kitchen-to provide additional living space.
The golden age of bungalow construction in Chicago was the decade following World War I; some 100,000 were erected in the city and Cook County suburbs. Not only were soldiers returning from war, but European immigrants from earlier years were finally grabbing a toehold in the American economy, and young men and women were flocking to the city from farms, lured by jobs and the excitement of city life. Between 1890 and 1930, Chicago’s population tripled, jumping to 3.4 million.
A severe housing shortage drove apartment rents through the roof, but, with more than half a million vacant lots in the city in 1921, the price of land remained low. Cheap land and cheap transportation-the extension of public transit out to the edges of the city and the proliferation of automobiles-set the stage for the bungalow boom that followed.
Many of the families who moved into the new bungalows were immigrant families who, after being cooped up in crowded apartments, were lusting for homes of their own.
“They were land-hungry,” says Perry Duis, an urban historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Owning land would have made them almost nobility in the homeland, but they were able to afford it here on a mechanic’s salary.”
The mass construction of bungalows in the 1920s affected the nature of Chicago in more ways than just changing its physical appearance.
As Harry Meyer drives down the streets of the Marquette Park neighborhood, past blocks and blocks of bungalows-some featuring the exact same bungalow design on lot after lot after lot-he suggests that the similar (or identical) style of housing shared by homeowners helped build community.
“It kind of binds you together,” says Meyer, a project director with the non-profit Greater Southwest Development Corporation, who lives in a bungalow.
“When we were out stoop-sitting, it was a communal thing,” he says. “People would come by walking, and you’d say hi.The bungalow wasn’t a showy thing. It was common, but common was something to be proud of.”
There were drawbacks, however, to such instantly built neighborhoods, notes UIC’s Duis. For one thing, bungalows constructed at the same time deteriorated at the same rate, falling into disrepair almost simultaneously.
Also, a bungalow neighborhood tended to be settled by families from the same ethnic background-Poles with Poles, Lithuanians with Lithuanians, Irish with Irish. That helped foster community, Duis says, but also an isolation from other groups. The result was a deepening of Chicago’s patterns of segregation and a heightened xenophobia that were factors in the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s.
This is a history that Chicagoans know and recall whenever a politician talks of the city’s “Bungalow Belt.” The words bring to mind white, ethnic neighborhoods, middle-class and lower-middle-class, hard-working parents, straight-living kids, well-trimmed lawns-and a feeling of being elbowed aside.
Like many stereotypes, the image of “Bungalow Belt” as white enclave is, to a great extent, out of date. True, the white ethnics who remain on the Northwest Side and Southwest Side most often live in bungalows. But many bungalow owners today in Chicago-perhaps even a majority-are the African-American and Hispanic and Asian families who moved into homes when the whites left.
And their affection for their bungalows-their identification with the structure and with the idea of middle-class respectability that it represents-is just as strong as that of the earlier owners.
“I love it,” Betty Gutierrez says of her bungalow near Midway Airport. “My house has so much charm. Sorry, but it does, not to sound immodest.”
Gutierrez, a bookkeeper, and her bus driver husband are raising three teenage daughters in the home, and there’s more than enough room for all five family members-closets galore, a finished basement, two kitchens (the one in the basement for summer use) and a formal dining room.
Above all, there is the solidness of the home. It seems to say much about strength of character and family ties and permanence.
Betty Gutierrez says, “We have a brick wall. I like that. One of my sisters, she has a $350,000 house, and you could put your hand through the wall. You couldn’t dare do that in my house.”