North side of Lunt, between Clark and Ravenswood

Another reprint from the 2003 booklet:

For this project the streetscape was the basic unit of information, but that wasn't really enough to understand how the buildings relate to the space around them.  For that I needed some panoramic images, but not so large that the street would be distorted beyond recognition.

This image shows the relationship of the building on the far left to the metra tracks and overpass just to the west.

And this shows the alley beween the car repair shop and the second building from the left, along with a glimpse of the taller building to the right, which has frontage on both Lunt and Clark.  Nowadays I might have chosen to add streets names for clarity.

Above is some of the information taken from the ancient permit files and the criss-cross directories I found at the Chicago Historical Society.  Sometimes I was lucky enough to find a business description on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps.

And I couldn't leave out this auto repair shop.  Here's what I wrote about it at the time:

This repair shop and filling station was built adjoining a large horse stable to the north.  For a while you could fill up your gas tank or have your horse groomed at the same place.  The stables were later converted to light industry (screen manufacturing) and eventually demolished.  The shape of the stables explains the oddly shaped parking lot behind this building.

Later I read John Jakle and Keith Sculle's great book, The Gas Station in America, which has a chapter analyzing the transition from horse-based service buildings to car-based. I wish I had read that first, but I'll come back to it some day.

The building on the far right (the Doland Block) was saved for a page of its own.