[Frederick Nachman]

Marketed as a tear-down in late 2015, the 1895 cottage instead is undergoing a massive renovation involving both demolition and additions to the back and side of the lot.

—Frederick Nachman

Viewing east towards the Near North skyline from 900 block of Hudson Avenue. Vacant former site of Cabrini Extension South high-rises in foreground. Gabriel X. Michael/Chicago Patterns

Located just north of downtown and on the eastern side of Chicago’s man-made Goose Island and North Branch Canal, the Lower Near North Side has been called many names, and served as home to Chicago’s poor working class and multi-ethnic waves of immigrants.

It was notably put under a microscope by urban sociologist Harvey Warren Zorbaugh in his highly-influential and precedential book The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), where he chronicled its notorious living conditions, detailed its socio-economic makeup, and elucidated tangled patterns of dysfunction sustaining this “slum’s” existence, blocks from one of Chicago’s wealthiest communities to the east. Central to his philosophy was the idea of “natural areas” within a city–the unplanned, organic enclaves that emerge out of a coincidence of physical geography and cultural segregration: the Lower Near North Side being a prime example of this urban phenomena.

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The Noble Horse, located at 1410 N. Orleans in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, is one of our city’s most unique historic venues. Noble Horse is currently Chicago’s last remaining Riding Hall, and also serves as headquarters for one of the city’s most popular carriage rides services.

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