Workers cottages, a style of house that became popular in the 1880s, made home ownership a possibility for countless working class families and formed the heart of many older suburbs.
A workers cottage across Williams Street from industrial buildings associated with the limestone quarry in Thornton. An effort is underway to promote the early architectural style in the Chicago region. It’s easy to picture urban life in the 19th century, when Chicago was teeming with newly arrived immigrants who were establishing neighborhoods and packing their families into old tenement buildings on the fringes of the city.
As the limestone mansions of gilded age magnates were erected along Prairie Avenue, entire neighborhoods of simpler structures popped up on former prairie land surrounding freshly laid rail lines and new industrial campuses. It’s a portion of the Chicagoland housing stock that’s increasingly at risk because of age, modest origins and in some areas, neighborhood gentrification.
“You had Polish and German immigrants in places like Calumet City, when they could buy a house it would be four rooms, but they could build on to it,” Bigott said. “It was a frame house, so it was really easy to build on to the back of it, or even raise the cottage and make it a two-story. They were very adaptable housing, very flexible.
Because of their simple wooden frame construction, workers cottages such as this one on 170th Street in Hazel Crest were easy to expand and customize. In this case, roof dormers and a front foyer were added. As with all brief summaries, that’s a vast oversimplification of a concept complicated by major factors, Lewinnek points out, such as racist housing policies and redlining as well as exploitative practices of employers and banking institutions. But the entire mix of factors in circa 1890s Chicago “helped create a city that became a model for America’s suburban growth.”
Still, Bungalows, too, enjoyed massive popularity until another invention upended the way people used their homes. Two workers cottages face industrial buildings associated with the quarry across Williams Street in Thornton, where limestone has been extracted from an ancient reef since the mid-1800s. One of the important facets of workers cottages was a back door, which often became the main point of access for the homes.