The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin, reviewed the new park on Adams and Sangamon in the West Loop. With its geometric pattern, misting archways, hills, and state of the art playground, it’s one of the most exciting new parks in the city.
From the same folks who brought you Center Square Journal, Roscoe View Journal is a new hyperlocal news site focused on the Chicago neighborhoods of Roscoe Village and West Lakeview. Check out both of them for community-level news on events, dining, nightlife, local politics, and more.
With Chicago’s big newspapers slashing newsroom staff and alt-weeklies forced to survive on shoestring budgets, coverage of the city’s various neighborhoods increasingly falls through the cracks. That’s where “hyperlocal” sites like The Center Square Ledger come in. Launched this week, it covers the Lincoln Square, North Center, and Ravenswood Manor neighborhoods exclusively, from local elections to events to feature stories about neighborhood residents and businesses. Those of you who live in one of these great Northside communities or are thinking of moving there should definitely check it out.
Coldwell Banker has a new channel on YouTube featuring videos with real estate advice, market news, and community profiles like the one above about Pilsen.
Urban lifestyle a big draw for buyers in West Loop
The West Loop is no longer just Oprah’s ‘hood. It’s known as a condo loft market, but as more people move to the neighborhood and start families, it has started to fill in with townhomes and further develop its retail and commercial amenities. The Tribune’s feature on the West Loop this week highlights some of the developments going on in one of our favorite neighborhoods.
This piece in the Sun-Times basically amounts to an extended marketing flyer for a home (we wish we could get that kind of press for our listings), but it features one of the most beautiful blocks in the city. The Jackson Boulevard Historic District, between Laflin and Ashland, just west of Whitney Young High School, is a gallery of Victorian row houses and mansions, built after the great Chicago fire in 1871 and leading up to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, when the near west side was one of the most fashionable places to live in the city. The block feels as though it were transplanted from the more vintage, tree-lined streets of Lincoln Park, hidden among the mostly new condo developments of the West Loop. The home getting the full press treatment in the article is the jewel of the block, a red-brick Queen Anne mansion with coach house built on a corner lot, now fully restored and on sale for $2.25 million.
On October 7, the city will be sponsoring a showcase of more than 35 mixed-income housing developments, ranging from Rogers Park on the north side to West Pullman on the south side. The tours will include model units from $139,000 to $800,000. The developments have been partially funded by the government, which supports so-called “affordable units” or “workforce housing,” homes that have been made available to qualifying buyers at set rates.
Tours begin from the UIC campus at 750 S. Halsted. Each tour is three hours, visiting one of five areas of the city. For more information, go to the Calvalcade of Homes website.
Millenium Park has been a catalyst for residential real estate development downtown, causing the center of the city’s urban living to move progressively south. This lengthy profile in the New York Times details the park’s effect on the market.
Buying new construction in the city isn’t all about condos. There are plenty of single-family homes to be found, either as infill or in planned developments. This article from the Sun-Times profiles a handful of these new developments.
While one should always be skeptical of the veracity of Wikipedia articles, it’s hard to find fault with this guide to the Neighborhoods of Chicago. It features maps and brief descriptions of 76 different neighborhoods in the city. It may not be a definitive guide, but the next time someone tells you they’re from Portage Park or Beverly, you can get a rough idea of where exactly that is.
We could have included this with our post on Chicago maps, but Chicago Neighborhoods includes so much beautiful photography that we thought it was worth the individual attention. Click on any of the neighborhoods in blue (it’s a work in progress) to see dozens of street-level views of architecture.
Big box retailers, discount warehouses, and grocery chains are scrambling to build downtown as more and more people decide to live in the city. Home Depot is planning a new store at Roosevelt and Jefferson, Costco wants a 135,000 square-foot site in the South Loop, and grocery stores like Dominick’s, Jewel, and Whole Foods continue to expand in the city.
We found a slew of useful Chicago maps this weekend:
Chicago Census 2000 maps from the University of Chicago, local maps of data generated by the last census, including housing age, income levels, demographic makeup, population changes, and transit use.
CTA Google Maps overlaid with all the CTA stops let you pinpoint exact locations and transfer points with all the useful features of Google Maps.
HousingMaps, another Google Map hack that overlays craigslist housing rental, sublet, and for sale data. Lets you search by price point.
A zip code map from The Chicago Reader.
Chicagocrime.org, a database that lets you search for criminal activity by street address, zip code, ward, landmarks, and travel routes.
Chicago Menu Pages is more than just maps of restaurants, it’s a complete search engine for food in the city. You can search by a particular type of cuisine, even down to a particular dish, by neighborhood, and even by which spots are open late night. Searches turn up full menus of the restaurants, and if they don’t have your favorite, just tell them and they’ll add it to their database.
Search for the lowest gas prices at ChicagoGasPrices.com
Chicagoist also posted a nice roundup yesterday of the best eateries in the new-old Maxwell Street Market area between UIC, Pilsen, and Little Italy. The multiple construction projects along Halsted and areas west have taken over 10 years to finish, but the changes in just the past few have been dramatic as both the University Village and University Commons developments near completion.
Sunday’s Sun-Times Homelife section ran a spotlight on the West Roscoe Village neighborhood, a “vintage blue-collar industrial neighborhood.” The area is bounded by Western Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway and Diversey and Addison, bisected by the north branch of the Chicago River.
The neighborhood has drawn interest because of its affordability in comparison to those closer to downtown, as many other residential areas north and west of the city do. It offers an enticing mix of two- and three- flat apartments, single-family homes, and empty lots for development. The article details a number of development projects in the area.
