What was once described as an undesirable swampland has been transformed into one of the most beautiful and wealthiest neighborhoods in America. Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, developed in the late 1800s, was first called the Astor Street District. It was named after one of the first multimillionaires in the United States, John Jacob Astor--even though Astor never lived in Chicago. In 1885, Astor Street District's first mansion was built. Potter Palmer, a dry goods merchant and owner of the Palmer House Hotel, built his palatial, castle-like residence on the corner of Lake Shore Drive and Banks Street; inside the Palmer mansion were 42 lavishly furnished rooms, which required 26 servants to maintain. Many wealthy Chicagoans followed Palmer's lead and built mansions in the neighborhood. Several homes took up an entire city block and, as time progressed, the name Gold Coast was adopted. On January 30, 1978, the entire Gold Coast district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Join authors Wilbert Jones, Maureen V. O'Brien, and Kathleen Willis Morton, longtime residents of the Gold Coast, on an engrossing journey through the neighborhood's history. Includes archival images along with the more contemporary images of photographer Bob Dowey.

"This is a book about Chicago. It is also, and for that very reason, a book about every other American city which has lived long enough and grown large enough to experience the transformation of neighborhoods and the contact of cultures and the tension between different types of individual and community behavior. . . . Here is a type of sociological investigation which is equally marked by human interest and scientific method."—Christian Century

Chicago, 1988. I was 52 years old, 5'4" tall, and 130 pounds, with red hair and a 36DDD bust, enjoying dramatic Lake Michigan and skyline views from my 21st-floor apartment in the landmark Lake Point Towers building. I had never felt more alive. I was Chicago's reigning madam, providing $400 an hour call girls to Chicago's business owners, traders, lawyers, judges, politicians, mobsters, pro athletes, and Hollywood stars at addresses all over Chicago's downtown and Gold Coast. Vice was on their way up--the doorman had tipped me off. I started thinking back on my life, where I came from, and how I ever got to where I was now. I began life the youngest of nine on a primitive farm in the backwoods of Tennessee. Seeking to make my own way in the world I would meet and marry a man from Cicero, Illinois. Soon I was pregnant eight times in eight years, malnourished, and beaten--once nearly to death. That’s when I left. When I recovered and returned for my five kids, I discovered they'd been put in a brutal orphanage. It took me years to get them back. God knows why I got into this business. It was to save my kids. But I chose to stay. I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and I’d still do it today if I could... From my earliest days as a hanky-panky entrepreneur in the 1960s--renting rooms by the hour at the Addison Motel--others took notice. Playboy, Penthouse, the Sybaris. My adventures took me to all over the Western Suburbs, to Atlanta, Savannah, and the Oak Brook Polo Fields, and eventually to the nightclubs, bars, yachts, and penthouses of Chicago’s Gold Coast. I’d work in this business until 2002 when the FBI busted me and I served 17 months in federal prison. Now I’m retired, living in Florida, and spending my days like many seniors here, walking, playing with my grandchildren, going to church. Let me take you back to my days of juggling three sugar daddies, living and breathing sex, providing the city’s elite with beautiful women, having loads of cash and tons of fun, and experiencing the joys and heartaches of a life on the edge, lived to its fullest.

"A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago ... an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development."-- Kirkus Reviews In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the m

The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

A pictorial history of Chicago's mansions includes fashionable residences designed by such architects as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Hobson Richardson, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root.

Situated in Chicago's famed Gold Coast, just north of the Magnificent Mile, the Charnley house is one of the finest dwellings in the city and considered worldwide to be a stunning example of avant-garde architecture. Now the headquarters of the Society of Architectural Historians and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, the house was built in 1892 at a critical moment in urban and architectural history. The Charnley House is the first authoritative publication on the building, which has long been discussed in surveys but never before examined in detail. In this collection of original essays, six well-known architectural historians illuminate various aspects of the house, both inside and out, as they consider its remarkable formal and spatial qualities, its historical significance in the development of Chicago's elite residential neighborhood, and its place in the context of American domestic architecture. Equally important, the contributors tackle the knotty, decades-old issue concerning the building's designer. While many have ascribed the scheme to Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan's chief assistant at the time, this book sheds new light on how the house relates significantly to the work of both master and apprentice. The continuing debate over the house's "authorship" highlights the importance of the Charnley house in the history of modern architecture as the seminal work of residential design in the United States. These thoroughly researched interpretations, supplemented by an abundance of never before published illustrations, analyze this house of distinction with the care and detail it deserves. Beautifully restored in late 1980s, the Charnley house now has a book worthy of it.