A collection of articles that originally appeared in the Chicago Daily News from March 1939 through February 1941, presenting "a blend of historical, biographical, architectural, and social facts" for each entry.

The suburban residential area running north above Chicago along

An architectural history of the Old Town neighborhood in the City of Chicago featuring historic houses and their owners, illustrated with photographs of interiors and exteriors and paintings by noted artists

Excerpt from Old Illinois Houses As almost all Of us know, half Of the population Of Illinois lives in Chicago. To this half belongs John Drury. It took considerable foreign and domestic travel in his earlier years, however, to make him realize that his native heath is just as good a place to write about as any other spot on earth. As a romantic-minded young man, he lived in New York's Greenwich Village, worked as a cub reporter in los Angeles, served on merchant ships to South America and London, traveled in Canada, and cruised the Spanish Main aboard a luxury liner. In time, though, John Drury felt the call of his native Midwest and here, after returning to it, he began his writing career. In addition to his Chicago residence, he now maintains a summer home at Chesterton, Indiana. It was just after the University Of Chicago Press published his Old Chicago Houses in 1941 that John Drury began work on the articles which form the contents Of this book. One day in the early spring Of 1941, when snow floated down between gloomy Loop buildings and hissed on the cold surface of the Chicago River, he loaded into his car his Wife, his dog, and his typewriter, and began the first Of three circular motor tours through southern, central, and northern Illinois, totaling some miles. His quest was historic Illinois houses. The results Of his journeys appear in this book Where they are reproduced from a series Of weekly articles published in the Daily News. Having covered thehistoric-house field in his native city and native state, Mr. Drury, quite naturally, expanded his horizon again, and thus there appeared, in 1947, his Historic Midwest Houses. This volume involved a -mile tour Of the Midwest which was made possible by a Regional Writing Fellow ship awarded him by the University Of Minnesota. Readers of Old Illinois Houses will find this book a rather complete, though informal, history Of our state. Here are described houses that represent the French period. Other chapters deal with dwellings used during the English occupaiion, and here, too, are residences Of the American aristocrats appointed in Washington to administer the frontier government. How can anyone understand the enterprising bankers who came early to Illinois, without seeing the house Of John Marshall at Shawneetown? On Rock Island stands the mansion Of George Daven port, fur trader, and this expresses his affluence better than can be done in a thousand words. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism--the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region's built environment. Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the "Battledeck House" by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny's gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients--typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking--helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study--until now.