Did you know that the Dunning community area on the far Northwest Side started out as a site for poor farms, tuberculosis sanitariums, and insane asylums? According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, it wasn’t until after the poor farm closed and the state bought the sanitarium that the area became a desirable place to live. Even then, the Dunning name was so damaged that the Schorsch brothers, in an early case of neighborhood rebranding, billed the land where they were building (an area bounded by Addison Street, and Belmont, Naragansett, and Harlem avenues) as “West Portage Park.”
Today, part of that area’s known as Schorsch Village, a largely Polish enclave where the streets are lined with English Tudors, bungalows, and ranch-style homes. It hasn’t been a hotbed of new construction — in fact, there isn’t a single new construction home for sale within the Schorsch Village boundaries — but there are close to 100 homes listed there, ranging from just $79,000 for a one-bedroom / one-bath condo to the $590s for a six-bedroom single-family. Looking beyond the village into the rest of Dunning, a couple of new-construction single-family homes surface with prices in the $570s and $580s.
See dozens of photos of Schorsch Village in YoChicago’s Flickr album, or view them as a slideshow through the neighborhood’s NewHomeNotebook page. And, if you have a few hours to while away, you can sample over 10,000 YoChicago images of nearly 100 neighborhoods at Flickr.