Chicago's West Side , west of the Chicago River, was
where the Great Fire of 1871 started - supposedly when Mrs
O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern. The flames spread quickly east
to engulf the entire central city, which was built of wood and fed
the fire for three full days. Appropriately enough, the O'Leary
cottage is now the site of the Chicago Fire Department training
academy. The West Side also saw 1886's Haymarket Riots ,
when striking workers assembled at the old city market at
Desplaines and Randolph streets; after a peaceful demonstration, as
police began to break up the crowd, a bomb exploded, killing an
officer. Six more policemen and four workers died in the resulting
panic; four labor leaders were later found guilty of murder and
hanged, despite the fact that none of them had been present at the
event.
Though the West Side has little to see compared with the rest of
the city, it does provide a good look at its day-to-day realities,
having served as the port of entry for Chicago's myriad ethnic
groups, now congregated in its distinct neighborhoods. Milwaukee
Avenue , which stretches under the "El" tracks diagonally from
the Loop out towards O'Hare Airport, has long been home to a
sizable eastern European community, mainly Poles - over a million
alto gether, including some 60,000 who came to Chicago during the
martial-law era of the 1980s. For an introduction, stop by the
Polish Museum of America (daily noon-5pm; free; ) at 984 N
Milwaukee Ave, or the Ukrainian National Museum , 721 N
Oakley (Thurs-Sun 11am-4pm and by appointment; free; ).
Greektown , the few blocks of Halsted Street north of the
I-290 freeway, and Little Italy , along Taylor Street west
of Halsted, are both just a short walk from the University of
Illinois subway station, on the CTA Congress line. Four blocks
southeast of Little Italy is Maxwell Street and the site of the
famed Maxwell Street Market . Although the city banned the
market for various reasons in 1994, a new Maxwell Street Market was
born on Canal Street and Roosevelt Road. It's still a lively place
to visit on Sundays, when blues bands entertain on street corners
and kielbasa replaces bagels among the stallholders.
Ten miles west of the Loop, the affluent and attractive c.1900
suburb of Oak Park has been preserved as a national historic
district, thanks in part to its early influence on two very
different but very American figures, Ernest Hemingway and
Frank Lloyd Wright . Oak Park is easily accessible by public
transportation: take the Green Line west to the Harlem Avenue stop.
The visitor center , just over two blocks east of the
station at 158 N Forest Ave (summer daily 10am-5pm; rest of year
daily 10am-4pm; tel 708/524-7800, ), has an excellent architectural
walking tour map as well as guidebooks and free brochures.
Hemingway was born and bred in Oak Park, editing his high school
newspaper and living a normal middle-class life. Both his
birthplace (at 339 N Oak Park Ave) and his boyhood home (600 N
Kenilworth Ave) bear commemorative plaques, and there's an engaging
collection of memorabilia at the Oak Park and River Forest
Historical Society (Thurs-Sun 1-4pm; Thurs is free; $4) at 217
Home Ave, a block south of the station.
In 1889, a decade before Hemingway's birth, an ambitious young
architect named Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Oak Park, which he
used for the next twenty years as a testing ground for his
innovative design theories. Most of the 25 buildings he put up here
are in keeping with conventional Victorian design, and few are open
to the public; fortunately, however, his most interesting and
groundbreaking edifices are maintained as monuments. His ideal of
an "organic architecture," in which all aspects of the design
derive from a single unifying concept - quite at odds with the
fussy "gingerbread" popular at the time - is exemplified by
Unity Temple at 875 Lake St. Though the simplicity of this
angular, reinforced-concrete structure was largely dictated by
economics, its unembellished surfaces contribute to a masterful
manipulation of space, especially in the skylit interior, where the
subtle interplay of overlapping planes creates a dynamic spatial
flow. Though little noticed in the US, Unity Temple was very
influential in Europe as a precursor of modern architecture.
Wright built his small, brown-shingled home and studio ,
nearby at 951 Chicago Ave on the corner of Forest Avenue, at age 22
in 1889, and remodeled it repeatedly thereafter. It shows all his
hallmarks: large fireplaces to symbolize the heart of the home and
family; free-flowing, open-plan rooms; and the visual linking of
interior and exterior spaces. The furniture of the kitchen and
dining rooms is Wright's own design; he added a two-story studio in
1898, with a mezzanine drafting area suspended by chains from the
roof beams. In 1909 Wright abandoned Oak Park and his family for
new pastures; he was eventually to design such landmarks as New
York's Guggenheim Museum. You can see the house itself on a
45-minute guided tour (Mon-Fri 11am, 1pm & 3pm, Sat & Sun
every 20min, 11am-3.30pm; $9). Lengthier walking tours ($9
including use of Walkman) take in the dozen other Wright-designed
houses within a two-block radius. Booking the walking and house
tours at the same time will save you $2.