This book is chock full of pictures and descriptions of the neighborhood known as the Southeast Side of Chicago. A must for anyone who grew up in this area. What memories! A definite coffee table addition to any home. And a wonderful gift.

Anyone from the southeast side of Chicago will love this book. It's full of great pictures of the places we grew up with. It makes a great gift for someone who's hard to buy for. I bought one for my older brother and he is enjoying all the memories it brings to mind.

This is a great book for everyone to read. Its all pictures with captions below. Anybody who grew up on the Southeast side (like me)need to buy this book. It has a history of this side dating back to before the turn of the century. I think it desearves more than a 5 star rating.

"The Chicago Bungalow" is a collection of essays created as a companion volume to a Chicago Architectural Foundation exhibition staged in connection with the City's Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative, which provides financing and other incentives to help bungalow owners improve and maintain their homes and communities. To this day, the bungalows themselves are an important part of Chicago's architectural heritage and the neighborhoods that grew up around them are part of what makes Chicago such a liveable city.

Although sponsored by an architectural organization, this book emphasizes social history rather than aesthetic appreciation. There is one brief essay on the characteristics of the bungalow (i.e., what is a bungalow and what, if anything, sets Chicago bungalows apart from those found in other areas of the country), but most of the rest of the text addresses how the various areas were developed by real estate tycoons and others, how bungalows were built and financed, how the modern conveniences they contained affected the lives of women, which social groups bought bungalows (interestingly, the non-Chicago authors seem to think these were middle class neighborhoods, while the Chicago authors mostly characterize them as working class), the social organizations of one bungalow community (Portage Park), and how neighborhoods have changed (primarily racially) over the years. (The latter essay mostly glosses over Chicago's sad history of segregation, racism, block busting and white flight.) I found the information on the "own your own home" movement (a relatively recent part of the American dream) and on the standardization of plumbing fixtures and non-standarization of wood trim particularly interesting. Black-and-white pictures throughout the book more or less illustrate the text (sometimes the connection is not obvious) and there is a 16-page section of color photos illustrating the diversity of forms and some of the decorative features of Chicago bungalows.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the origins of this housing form and how it affected the lives of working class Chicagoans. If your interest is confined to the aesthetic aspects of bungalows, however, this will not add much to what you already know.

Nice book on Chicago's own bungalow tradition. Nice pictures of not only classic Chicago bungalows, but of many of it's inhabitants in the great Chicago Bungalow Belt. Only wish the book was longer and had more color photos, but it does show examples of my favorite part of the Chicago bungalows from the 1920's, art glass. They will NEVER build houses like these again. Attention to the Southside as well as the Northside belts. Recommended reading for us lay people who love Chicago's unique brick bungalows.

If you've traced your Polish ancestors back to turn-of-the-century Chicago, You will find a lot of valuable insights on their experience by reading this book. The life of any new immigrant was never very easy in this country and Pacyga leads you through all of the hardships that these determined people faced. Unfortunately, Pacyga's focus shifts away from the immigrant towards the end of the book and he includes an in-depth history of Chicago's labor unions. Although the unions certainly affected the Polish immigrant's life, I thought that too much of the divergent chapters were off-subject. But, don't let that discourage you from reading it. There is real American history being told here.