The Field Guide to Chicago Buildings was developed as a collaborative effort between the City Design Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Chicago Teachers' Center of Northeastern Illinios University with funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the United States Department of Education.

Although it came in various forms, the basic postwar single-story and story-and-a-half American house was a distinctive building type.

Ranch House: The term “ranch house” refers to a wide variety of one-story dwellings with low pitched roofs. These houses ranged from fairly large, rambling structures to the small “basic ranch” discussed here. The term was popularized in California between the wars by architects like Cliff May who used imagery from Western farming properties in order to create an informal, asymmetrical building type. It appears that it was primarily the term and not the building type that was taken over for use in houses of this type in the Chicago area.

Cape Cod: The term “Cape Cod” refers to a story-and-a-half cottage commonly built in new England in the Colonial period but also revived in the late nineteenth century for use across much of America. The postwar Cape Cod abandoned many of the specific stylistic features of the earlier house type, retaining primarily the simple massing. The Cape Cod and the Ranch are really variants of the same building type, the Cape Cod having a higher pitched roof that allowed for a small upstairs attic space that could be finished off into additional living space.

Design Features: In the case of either the Ranch or the Cape Cod, the building type itself was actually a transformation of the late nineteenth century worker’s cottage and the interwar Chicago bungalow. Like the bungalow a typical Cape Cod or basic Ranch house had a minimal plan with four to six rooms and less than 1,000 sq. feet of living space. The biggest difference between the bungalow and the ranch was that the prewar bungalow usually sat on a lot no wider than 25 to 33 feet. This meant that the house was set at right angles to the street with the gable fronting the street and circulation through the house through a set of public rooms on one side of the building with bedrooms and bathes opening off of these rooms. In the ranch house the larger typical postwar lot, usually 50 or 60 feet wide, allowed the building to be turned ninety degrees so that the long side of the house faced the street and the roof ridge ran parallel to it. This allowed for a more compact plan and more window area without sacrificing privacy. In the Ranch and Cape Cod the living room and kitchen usually occupy one side of the house and bedrooms the other. This arrangement allowed all rooms to occupy a corner of the house and hence benefit from windows on two sides. In the Cape Cod two small bedrooms often occupied the half story under the roof. One of the most common and perhaps most conspicuous design features of this building type was the large “picture window” on the front of the house, allowing a view from the living room to the street. There was often a matching window from the kitchen allowing for a good view into the back yard.

Location: Ranch houses and Cape Cod cottages are widely scattered throughout the metropolitan area in virtually every area constructed for families of modest income. The largest band occurs in a great arc some 4 to 6 miles from the Chicago Loop across South Side communities of Chicago, through Western suburbs like Oak Lawn, Bedford Park, Brookfield Maywood, Melrose Park, Franklin Park and through the northernmost tier of the North Side of Chicago and inner suburbs like Niles and Morton Grove. There also tends to be a band of Cape Cods and ranch houses around the prewar nucleus of a great many established railroad suburbs further out.

Construction: Typical construction for these houses was standard 2X4 frame construction clad in clapboard or masonry veneer. For reasons of economy they usually had only a crawl space and no basement. The Cape Cods usually had an unfinished attic. This was often converted into additional rooms.

Illustration: Cape Cod house at 8220 S. Merrimac Avenue, Burbank, constructed 1954. Drawings by Rafal Banik, 2000.