Chicago’s entire class of vintage residential courtyard buildings — totaling in the thousands — could be headed for the National Register of Historic Places under a measure before a state panel Friday.
The nine-member Illinois National Register Advisory Council will decide whether to ask the National Park Service to approve a multiple-property designation encompassing the city’s inventory of courtyard buildings.
Ramsey Historic Consultants Principal Emily Ramsey, who prepared the nomination report that the state advisory council will consider, said the federal designation would recognize and uplift Chicago’s courtyard buildings as an important class of historic structures.
It also would make it easier for owners and developers to later get National Register listings for individual courtyard buildings. Individually listed structures can be eligible for state and federal tax breaks that could substantially offset the costs of an historically correct rehab or restoration.
“I like to call it an umbrella document,” Ramsey said of the multiple-property designation. “Once you have this umbrella document set up, you can list individual buildings that — without this context — would not be seen as rising to the level of an individual National Register listing.”
If used correctly, the two listings could help take some of the financial sting out of fixing up and preserving a large but high-quality component of the city’s aging inventory of rental and condo buildings.
“There are thousands of courtyard buildings in the city,” Ramsey said.
The state’s National Register Advisory Council will vote on a separate request for an individual listing for the courtyard-styled — and aptly named — Casa Bonita Apartments, a Spanish Revival treasure at 7340-50 N. Ridge Blvd. in Rogers Park.
The council and the National Park Service would do well to approve both measures that would give honor and some financial incentives to a fine building type that graces just about every Chicago neighborhood — and bolsters the city’s architectural reputation.
Built between the 1880s and the late 1960s, courtyard buildings took on many architectural forms from the ornate to the modern.
But the scheme was largely the same: a three or four-story building surrounding park-like, private green space. Ramsey’s research identified seven types of courtyard buildings, ranging from those with a simple L-shaped plan to large M-shaped buildings with two of three landscaped courtyards.
In the then rapidly growing city, the buildings were a way to accommodate population density in attractive housing without sacrificing access to natural light, fresh air and green space.
“They’re important as part of the fabric of the city,” Ramsey said. “A reflection of how the city developed. It takes the ideal of Chicago as a city in a garden and applies that to residential architecture. You have shared open space, and, in some of these buildings along parks and boulevards … it kind of blends into the larger parkland. That’s what I think the Chicago courtyard building does so successfully.”
“And you could have a range of apartments,” Chicago author and historian Julia Sniderman Bachrach said. “One building could have people on a much tighter budget and more well-to-do, upper-middle-class people all living in the same complex. Then, there are so many advantages with the courtyard itself — it almost emulated the advantages of having your own single-family home with a yard.”
Among the best of the courtyard buildings: the ornate, Renaissance Revival Pattington condos at 660-700 W. Irving Park Road. Built in 1904 and individually listed on the National Register since 1980, the brick-and-limestone, 72-unit complex boasts two large, landscaped courtyards.
The Casa Bonita Apartments is a Mediterranean Revival treasure awash in terra cotta details, exterior walkway stairs with balustrades and a courtyard featuring a reflecting pool and a water bearer sculpture.
“It’s really interesting to look at how the designers and the residents [of courtyard buildings] treated the courtyard space,” Sniderman Bachrach said. “You often will see fanciful kinds of shared outdoor spaces.”
“I always thought the building itself was lovely,” said long-time Casa Bonita condo owner Linda Bressler, who wrote the building’s National Register nomination with fellow resident Amy Lloyd and the help of students from a Loyola University Chicago history class.
Bressler said a National Register listing for the 98-year-old edifice is “a long time coming” and that the recognition would be “very nice for the building.”
Ramsey’s detailed and illustrated report gives special attention to 245 courtyard buildings, including the Victorian-era Pelham Apartments, 334 W. Dickens Ave., built in 1889; the mammoth Marshall Field Garden Apartments, 1336-1452 N. Sedgwick St., that has a huge court that is totally enclosed by the building; and the overlooked Merrion Square in South Shore, composed of six Art Moderne buildings, each wrapping around a grassy courtyard.
Built in 1948, the buildings are located at 2024-34, 2038-48, and 2050-60 E. 72nd Place, and 2025-35, 2039-45 and 2051-61 E. 72nd St.
“It was a building type that continued to evolve,” Sniderman Bachrach said, “through Art Deco, Art Moderne and the Modern era. It just really shows that the buildings were a very livable, very desirable space for living.”
Ramsey said she created the nomination report while working with the nonprofit developer Preservation of Affordable Housing. The organization is rehabbing 1920s courtyard buildings in Austin at 5401-15 W. Washington Blvd. and the Washington Manor, 5113-23 W. Washington Blvd.
“They were getting low-income housing [rehab] tax credits, and they wanted to also layer in historic tax credits,” she said. “We took look at these two buildings and said, ‘We don’t think an individual listing is likely, but there is this thing we can do for the multiple properties.’ And, to their credit, they jumped at the opportunity.”
National Register multiple property listings “are a bit of an unsung hero,” Ramsey said. “When we did the residential hotels, it was kind of a similar situation. It worked so well for opening the door to [individual] National Register listings and to the incentives.”
If approved by the National Park Service, the designation for the multiple property courtyard listing, and Casa Bonita could be placed on the historic register by the fall.