Rentals gold coast
Due to the wall of Lake Shore Drive high-rises, the Gold Coast sometimes feels like the bottom of a canyon. Despite this walled-in atmosphere, if you use your imagination you can almost see the gaslights and hear the carriages and horse hooves on the cobblestones. If you happen to live in one of the Lake Shore Drive high-rises, you will enjoy a spectacular view of the lake. If you want a view that includes Lincoln Park, investigate some of the buildings bordering North Avenue.
A landmark along the Clark Street boundary between the Gold Coast and Old Town is Carl Sandburg Village, a combination high-rise and low-rise condominium community constructed in the 1960s. One of the few remaining mansions, and the only one with real grounds, can be found on North Boulevard at the base of Lincoln Park, home to the Archbishop of Chicago. While it is unlikely that you will find an apartment or condo with a lawn on the Gold Coast, you will find that Lincoln Park and the lakeshore are virtually at your doorstep.
The Gold Coast high-rises make for a high density population, but that does not keep people from living and living well in this neighborhood; rentals are comparable to the upper end of Streeterville-area prices. Apartments here are mostly in high rises, and many have garage space available for their tenants. The shoppers paradise of North Michigan Avenue is a brisk walk away, and Division Street nightlife is just around the corner. Oak Street beach, dramatically situated at the bend in the lake where Michigan Avenue ends, is a favorite lunch spot and a great escape destination. Again, here as in other downtown neighborhoods, on-street parking is at a premium;owning a car is not recommended, unless you can find and afford garage space.
Back of the ostentatious apartments, hotels, and homes of the Lake Shore Drive, and the quiet, shady streets of the Gold Coast lies an area of streets that have a painful sameness, with their old, soot-begrimed stone houses, their non-too-clean alleys, their shabby air of respectability. In the window of house after house along these streets one sees a black and white card with the words Rooms To Rent. For this is the world of furnished rooms, a world of strangely unconventional customs and people, one of the most characteristic of the worlds that go to make up the life of the great city.
This nondescript world, like every rooming-house district, has a long and checkered history.
The typical rooming-house is never built for the purpose;it is always an adaptation of a former private residence, a residence which has seen better days. At first, in its history as a rooming-house, it may be a very high-class rooming-house. Then, as the fashionable residence district moves farther and farther uptown, and as business comes closer and closer, the grade of the institution declines until it may become eventually nothing but a bums hotel or a disorderly house.
We have seen, in reading the history of the Near North Side, that after the fire this was a wealthy and fashionable residence district. But as business crossed the river and came north it became less and less desirable as a place to live. Gradually the fashionable families moved out of their old homes. Less well-to-do, transient, and alien groups came in. As the city has marched northward, however, land values and rentals have been slowly rising, until now the families who would be willing to live in this district cannot pay the rentals asked. As a result the large old residences have been turned into rooming-houses another chapter in the natural history of the city.
This lodging and rooming house district of the Near North Side lies between the Gold Coast on the east and Wells Street on the west, and extends northward from Grand Avenue and the business district to North Avenue. South of Chicago Avenue the district merges with the slum;its rooming and lodging-houses sheltering the laborer, the hobo, the rooming-house family, the studios of the bohemian, the criminal, and all sorts of shipwrecked humanity, while some of its small hotels have a large number of theatrical people and others the transient prostitute. The whole of the district is criss-crossed with business streets. The area north of Chicago Avenue, however, save for Clark Street, is not a slum area. And it is in this area, with its better-class rooming-houses in which live, for the most part, young and unmarried men and women.
The whole population turns over every four months. There are always cards in the windows, advertising the fact that rooms are vacant, but these cards rarely have to stay up over a day, as people are constantly walking the streets looking for rooms. The keepers of the rooming-houses change almost as rapidly as the roomers themselves. At least half of the keepers of these houses have been at their present addresses six months or less.
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