What are the densest, most NYC looking neighborhoods in Chicago? (Addison: apartment, houses)

[destroycreate]

I'm thinking the looks of Brooklyn, jam-packed row houses, narrow streets, bustling street life. What neighborhoods offer that vibe?

[Alacran]

No gritty ones.

[marothisu]

Closest areas to that might be parts of Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lakeview....but nothing in Chicago is as dense as even the densest areas of Brooklyn.

Lakeview, Edgewater, Near North Side (more high rises), and Rogers Park have 30,000 - 33,000 per sq mile. Brooklyn on average is more like 40,000 per sq mile. The areas above like Old Town and Lincoln Park especially do have those row houses in some areas and some narrow-ish streets, and they have bustling street life in some areas. Lakeview as well, and Edgewater and Rogers Park are dense as well but may not have a bunch of row homes and whatever.

[Lookout Kid]

Rowhouses are rare away from the east coast, and I can' think of any non-eastern city that has blocks and blocks of them going on for miles. Chicago has more row houses than most midwestern cities, and apparently there used to be a large concentration of them on the West Side that have since been largely demolished. But most of our urban brick and stone-faced 19th century buildings have at least a few feet between them, or are in small clusters of attached buildings.

[Irishtom29]

We have gangways, alleys and often (usually perhaps) grass between the buildings and the sidewalks and the sidewalks and the street. By the time Chicago was built Americans realized they had huge amounts of room.

[Chi-town Native]

I have read that some census tracts in ELV rival Bombay for density due to the high rises.

Broadway is what I think of when I think of high density & grit, try the streets between Diversey and Addison. After Broadway ends going south similar rowhouses/greystones are on the streets just east/west of Clark Street, from Diversey to North.

[ChicagoMeO]

What about Dearborn, beginning at North Avenue, going north for about 1/2 mile or so?

what about those pretty rowhouses, on Fullerton, 500 block going west.. and what about Belden Street in Lincoln Park?

[Lookout Kid]

Originally Posted by ChicagoMeO

What about Dearborn, beginning at North Avenue, going north for about 1/2 mile or so?

what about those pretty rowhouses, on Fullerton, 500 block going west.. and what about Belden Street in Lincoln Park?

2100-2200 N. Bissell has some wonderful rowhouses, but they don't look very much like Brooklyn. We certainly have them in clusters, and they are often really unique architecturally.

[Tex?Il?]

Originally Posted by Lookout Kid

Rowhouses are rare away from the east coast, and I can' think of any non-eastern city that has blocks and blocks of them going on for miles. Chicago has more row houses than most midwestern cities, and apparently there used to be a large concentration of them on the West Side that have since been largely demolished. But most of our urban brick and stone-faced 19th century buildings have at least a few feet between them, or are in small clusters of attached buildings.

St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh having had a population boom in the 1800s a little earlier, while not going on for miles do have a neighborhoods of rowhouses a little more than Chicago, despite their overall much smaller population and population density.

[It'sAutomatic]

We mostly have separated apartment buildings instead of rowhouses. The closest thing we have to brownstone Brooklyn are the oldest parts of the West and South sides, and they're mostly gone (try ~2600 block of Warren Blvd for an example). Chicago streets are about as narrow as Brooklyn streets.

Areas that boomed in the 1920s, such as Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park, Hyde Park, and South Shore look like parts of Brooklyn that boomed in the same time (Brighton Beach and East Flatbush come to mind), though our apartment buildings are capped at 4 stories instead of your 6. I do think these outer neighborhoods look much better in Chicago than yours, though maybe the prairie-style buildings and the gobs of trees just make them feel like home to me.



For anyone interested, I've figured out a big reason why Chicago doesn't have a really old and dense immigrant neighborhood like Lower Manhattan or Over-The-Rhine, Cincinnati: our industry has always been spread out over the entire city. Working people clustered around the steel works in South Chicago, the Stockyards, the lumber yards in Pilsen, and around the rivers and train lines where work sprouted up. Inner-city immigrant ghettoes were mostly swallowed up by industrial development (West Loop, South Loop), and what was left was cleared out later for public housing (the Sicilian/black area that became Cabrini-Green), highways (Greektown), and general development/"progress" (the area south of the Greyhound Station, Harrison and Desplaines).