Lost Houses of Lyndale
Sobre - Exposición - Historia - Índice - English

Lost Houses of Lyndale

Lost Houses of Lyndale is a project to memorialize dozens of homes which have been recently demolished due to rapid gentrification and redevelopment of one street in the Logan Square neighborhood.

Like many residential streets in Chicago, the two long blocks of Lyndale between California Avenue and Kedzie Boulevard are lined with a mix of ordinary frame houses and apartments. Few of the buildings could be considered architecturally significant or worthy of historic preservation; no famous Chicagoans once lived here. The history of the street since the 1880s is little recorded except in the built environment of its humble houses, which represent the hard-won rewards of home-ownership for generations of working-class immigrants who passed their property on to their children or sold to the next wave of immigrants to arrive.

Now, many families are selling their houses to developers. Construction crews topple the old houses in a day, scrape the ground clean and erect cinder-block condominium towers which relate little to the story of the street. To a passerby, these boxy dwellings quickly become the new familiar backdrop and there are few visible rem- nants of the history of the previous houses and residents of this place. Though I have lived on the street for over a decade, I too am forgetting my memories of the recently-demolished houses which had once been such familiar neighbors.

3036 Demolition

Lost Houses of Lyndale is a two-fold project to create portraits of these missing houses in careful pen-and-ink drawings and to discover and document stories of the families and individuals who lived their lives in these homes over the past 130 years. Through archival research of property records and census data as well as oral histories of older neighbors, the project is an ongoing attempt to record and re-tell local street history in the face of the discontinuity of city-wide redevelopment. The house portraits are framed in scraps of wood scavenged from the demolished buildings as a physical memory of the buildings, and miniature wooden models of the houses contain relics, toys, and photos left behind by former residents.

3036 Framed

These two blocks of Lyndale Street have lost twenty-three homes just since 2015. In the previous decade, eight houses were lost to development and one due to fire damage. Not since the 1920s has the street seen such a dramatic change in its architecture.

2800 Lyndale 2810

3000 Block Henrietta Building 3026 Lyndale

Lyndale Fragments 2

Lea más historias sobre la historia de la calle Lyndale

Gracias a Ellen Bergstrom por su ayuda en la traducción.

¿Tienes un recuerdo o una foto antigua de la calle Lyndale? ¡Por favor escribe!!

Texto e ilustraciones con derechos de autor Matt Bergstrom a menos que se indique lo contrario