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.

The Worker's Cottage: The word "cottage" was originally used in Britain to designate the small buildings occupied by workers on feudal estates. After the end of the feudal system the term came to mean small but sometimes quite elegant country residences. It is likely that the term "workers' cottage" came to be used when even families of very modest income were able to afford their own house. By comparison with the crowded "tenements" and other buildings at the core of cities like Chicago, the large tracts of land developed with cottages at the expanding edge of the metropolitan area were comparatively low in density and considered a great improvement for working class families. These buildings were constructed in great numbers from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. By the end of World War I the new version of this basic building type, the bungalow had largely supplanted it.

Design Features: Most cottages were small, narrow one story or one-and-a-half story buildings on standard lot sizes, which were typically 25 X 125 feet in the city of Chicago. A typical plan for a one-story cottage would have two or three public rooms on one side of the house with a set of small bedrooms opening up from these rooms on the other side. A story-and-a-half cottage might put some or all of the bedrooms in the upper half-story. The form of the cottage was usually a pitched roof rectangle with the gable facing the street and with a small extension in the rear to serve as kitchen.

Construction: Although some cottages were built in stone, the majority were built in wood, usually using balloon frame construction. Balloon frame construction was a system of building in which standardized timber sizes were put together using inexpensive machine cut nails. This system allowed for much quicker and less expensive construction than the older heavy timber construction in which the mortise and tenon joints had to be chiseled by hand. A great many cottages did not have running water, indoor plumbing or central heating when they were built. These amenities were often added in subsequent updates.

Location: Worker's cottages are found scattered across the metropolitan area in virtually all of the places where there was substantial building in the late nineteenth century. The most substantial collection of them is found, as one would expect, in a fairly tight arc that extends from one to three miles around the Loop. So for example, there is a very extensive set of these houses throughout the working class neighborhoods of the South and Southwest sides like Bridgeport and Back of the Yards, on the West and Northwest Sides in places like Pilsen or Bucktown and on the North Side in Old Town.

Sources of Information: Perhaps the best information on this building type can be found in the few pages devoted to it in Harold Mayer and Richard Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis. Chicago Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. pp. 154-162 and in Joseph Bigott, From Cottage to Bungalow, Housing and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago,1869-1929, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.