For a lot of the last hundred years, the area north of Willow between Halsted and Larrabee has been a kind of no man’s land. The modest cottage-lined blocks were never as picturesque as Old Town, or as gracious as the RANCH Triangle neighborhood to the west. But that’s all changed. Since the late 1990s this area has become a village of little palaces and castles.
The pair above is fairly typical of what’s replaced the simple worker’s houses — grand, heavily detailed edifices of brick and stone. Orchard Street has pretty much become the city’s new Billionaire’s Row. It’s like Astor Street on steroids, only with front-loaded garages [it’s one of the few places in Chicago without alleys].
Because houses here were easy [i.e. relatively cheap] to acquire, many enterprising moguls scooped up several, putting together 50, 75, 100 and even 125 foot-wide lots — a virtual impossibility in any other neighborhood this close to Francis Parker School [the new kids in the ‘hood don’t, by and large, go to Lincoln Park High]. New houses on two of the biggest of these assemblages are nearing completion, and amazingly, both look as if they’ll be positive additions to the streetscape.
While markedly different from one another, the houses have more than a little in common. Wheeler Kearns Architects — among the most important firms in town — designed both. And while no one will confirm the identity of the owners, it is widely understood that each is a member of one influential family or another that made a major contribution to Millennium Park.
Of course we’ll have to wait until the all the debris — and the scaffolding — is cleared, but these two houses may well illustrate that, despite conventional wisdom, people with really big money sometimes have really good taste.