Twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher Martin Kimbell blew into town from upstate New York in 1836. Andrew Jackson was president, the Potawatomi had been fought out and bought out of northern Illinois, and footloose young Yankees were turning Chicago into a go-getter city. Kimbell supposedly rejected land at Dearborn and Lake as “a damned mudhole”—the story’s so good I fear for its truth—and instead staked his claim to 160 acres five miles northwest. There he raised a crop of hay, the gasoline of the 1836 transportation system, and that was the start of what we now call Logan Square.
Kimbell’s fellow Yankees were in charge of what was left of the city, and they proposed to make it safe from future fires by outlawing wood structures. German immigrants fought the law (wood was all they could afford), and when it passed anyway, some of them moved out to Jefferson Township to build as they pleased. That’s right—long before there were University of Chicago economists to explain it, Logan Square showed that when government decrees one thing it often accomplishes something quite different.
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Annexation heralded Logan Square’s boom years as stores and houses replaced the remaining farms. The 1890s were to transportation as the 1990s were to computers. Cable cars replaced horse cars in 1890 and electric streetcars replaced cable in 1906. Meanwhile, the northwest branch of the Metropolitan Elevated began running trains to Logan Square on May 25, 1895. Transit generally followed a path laid down in Indian times, but the city’s boulevard system, designed in the 1860s and built in pieces over the next three decades, was something new. The generously proportioned boulevards attracted elegant houses, the side streets filled with modest homes and apartments for workers, and everybody shopped on the commercial streets. Rich and poor lived side by side; diversity was built into the neighborhood from this point on.
In a 1912 issue of American magazine, sportswriter Hugh Fullerton chronicled a legendary city-championship game at the ballpark between the Logan Square team and a team called the Gunthers. In the bottom of the ninth, a Gunther hit a potential game-winner, but it struck an extra ball the umpire had left on the field. Logan Square players fielded both balls, and threw them simultaneously to ace first baseman Frank McNichols—one high and to his left, the other low and to his right. McNichols caught both throws for the final out of the game. (McNichols also represented his west-side district in the Illinois General Assembly between 1905 and 1914.)
Logan Square was affordable to the Perez family, much as it had been a century earlier for Germans displaced by the fire. But since 1987 the number of home loans in Logan Square has quadrupled and their dollar value has multiplied 20 times. The march of the condos is now visible even to neighborhood outsiders on streets like Diversey. “No plan can stop this tide,” says the Logan Square Neighborhood Association’s May 2005 quality-of-life plan. “Then again, no thoughtful planner would try. Fresh investment can be life’s blood to a healthy neighborhood. But there are ways to meld the old and the new, to make the tapestry more interesting rather than tear it apart, or worse, bleach it to monochrome.”
