For those unacquainted with Bucktown, or for the well-acquainted who've grown jaded to the many delightful old cottages, churches, commercial buildings, and new-builds, Curbed is about to give you a reason to lift those eyes and look around. We present our Architectural Walking Tour of Bucktown. Our 21 mapped sites hit on the diversity of the 'hood's buildings, primarily in its housing stock. Our selections are meant as highlights in an area impossible to overrepresent owing to its great variety in style and taste. As it happens, we gravitated to a good number of contemporary new-builds which began arriving en masse 15 years ago or so. Boom time development reached the point where entire blocks of slick town homes, single-fams, and converted warehouse lofts took hold, particularly on blocks flanking Milwaukee and the "L".
Local landmarks include the Coyote Building, Noel State Bank Building (with its blinged-out Walgreens), Saint Mary of the Angels Church, Urban Sandbox, and Urban Treehouse. Many lesser sites are not known by proper names, so you'd probably not know to look for them. Interesting residential architecture is metastasizing around the Bloomingdale Trail, so that makes for a good launch point. Or, work east to west as we've plotted our map points. The neighborhood is larger than it seems once you try and canvas its blocks so we shaved our area of interest down to the neat rectangle framed by Western, Armitage, Ashland, and North. There's still a lot to see within this grid, so halving it at Damen isn't a bad plan for an afternoon stroll. And even though this is a walking tour, hopping the bike isn't frowned upon.
·Architectural Walking Tours [Curbed Chicago]
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