Old Town

This guide to Old Town in Chicago starts with the raised wood cottages that still line these blocks, built with no true ground floor after the Great Fire of October 1871 leveled this German immigrant neighborhood, then called North Town. It follows the three thousand emergency shacks the city rushed in before winter, and the craftsmen who replaced them with balloon-framed cottages perched on raised bases and dressed with borrowed Gothic windows and Renaissance details. Look for how these small wood frames sit shoulder to shoulder with sturdier brick rowhouses along the block.