They stand like silent little castles, rows and rows of them, some brown, some grey, most of them the same height. They face each other on both sides of so many streets, their formations sometimes interrupted by a bungalow or frame home. They are usually separated from each other only by a “gangway”, or narrow sidewalk path running from street to alley. And “gangway”, aside from its nautical use, is a uniquely Chicago term.
Most of them were built between 1900 and 1920, many by immigrants, and most sit on standard city lots, 25 feet wide by 125 feet deep. Although now more than a century old, they are remarkably little changed in appearance from when they first appeared. They are called two-flats, and they are as unique to Chicago as brownstones in Brooklyn , or rowhouses in Philadelphia.
If they could speak, they would tell you of the very first people they sheltered: the immigrants from all over Europe: Italians, Germans, Bohemians, Jews, Poles, Irish, Lithuanians, and others. These were the very families that caused them to come into being , and to be built in such great numbers; the families who, for the most part, came here from the ranks of poverty, and were eager to leave behind the oppressions of “the old country”. Their men took the low work that was available to them, on the bottom of the construction workforce as laborers, as streetcar men, sometimes low-end city workers, if they were lucky. Their women bore and cared for their children; often large families crowded under one roof.
The immigrant and the two- flat were an ideal marriage. A family seeking an escape from the tyranny of renting, and looking to climb the social ladder, could scratch together a down payment and buy a two-flat; not only finding a roof to put over your own head, but also earning income from someone not ready to take that step toward ownership. And so, the many great neighborhoods appeared as fast as human hands could assemble the buildings, across the exponentially growing Chicago, and almost always along ethnic lines.
Today some 70,000 two flats survive, or about 27 percent of the housing in the city, according to the Chicago Architectural Center. They can be found in many neighborhoods, including Little Village, Garfield Park, Austin, Norh and South Lawndale, and Pilsen.
Their design was simplicity itself: two identical floors, each a self-contained living unit. The owner tended to live on the first floor and the tenant on the second floor. Two or three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and a wooden back porch with stairs. The front usually featured a bay window and a porch for sitting.
My grandparents, both Irish immigrants, bought their two-flat on West Monroe Street around 1915. When my grandfather died of tuberculosis in 1918, leaving his widow with two small boys and no income, relatives urged her to go back to Ireland. She knew better. She left behind near constant hunger and a cruel British rule that stole all promise from the land. And she knew she could pay her mortgage with her tenant’s rent, while she put food on the table with her skills as a seamstress.
The little castles endured as the children of those immigrants grew up through the nineteen twenties, thirties, and forties. They watched as those families stitched themselves into the American fabric, indeed coming to redefine that fabric with their work ethic, their faith, and their abiding belief in the sanctity of family. They sheltered families across the decades, while those children became the policemen, firemen, city workers, tradesmen, politicians, and eventually the managers and bosses.
By the time I arrived in 1949, the most common family arrangement in the two- flats found the grandparent-owner on the first floor, and the family of one of their offspring on the second floor. That was my family’s living arrangement, and that of a dozen or more friends I grew up with. I remember we seemed a simple people, closer to poor than wealthy, but not really wanting for much. We had our common faith, we had our jobs or our schoolwork, and we had good friends and good neighbors. We felt safe, even if it was the safety that comes from being insulated from most of the world outside our neighborhood.
The little castles came to know a new kind of immigrant in the 1960’s. These “immigrants” did not cross an ocean, but rather rode trains up from the Jim Crow south, running away from their compromised citizenship and toward hopes for opportunity in the northern cities. Their children and grandchildren broke out of their restricted neighborhoods in Bronzeville and the city-built projects, seeking a step up the ladder. By the 1960’s, the winds of racial change blew irresistibly across the city, from east to west and southwest. Black families found easier financing made possible by the federal government; white flight was fueled by fear of losing the value of your home. Caught up in that irresistible sociological stormfront, my family and most other white families moved by 1968.
Some fifty years later, those little castles still shelter many of those families under their roofs. And ironically, those families seek what my grandparents sought. They want better jobs, better schools for their kids, safety in the neighborhoods, a chance to move up the social ladder.
Two-flats seem very far away now, a memory of my youth. Neither I nor most of my siblings ever owned a two-flat after our move from the Austin neighborhood. My family moved from our two-flat into a bungalow, the next step up the homeowner’s ladder.
I, as well as two of my sisters, rented from two-flat owners as we started out (my sister Mary Ann reminded me that her 1976 rent was $150 per month!). And as we married and purchased our first homes, our incomes and access to opportunity made the notion of having a tenant living above our heads seem like something that belonged to generations passed.
Most of the well-constructed two-flats are now more than one hundred years old and seem indestructible. They will no doubt exceed my lifespan, perhaps that of my children and grandchildren. And their story is not fully written yet, awaiting the next chapter in the endless tale of those seeking to move up the ladder of society in this country. Little castles indeed.