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By Virginia Gerst, Class of 2007

In 1888, the area that was to become the glittering Gold Coast was still very much in development. Neighborhood pioneers and major promoters Potter and Bertha Palmer had moved into their Castle at Lake Shore Drive and Schiller Street just three years earlier, the same year that Archbishop Patrick Freehan settled into his new Queen Ann-style mansion at 1555 North State Parkway. People were snapping up lots on which to build their dream houses.

Amid this construction frenzy, workers broke ground on The Houghton at 1510 North Dearborn (then 584 Dearborn) It was the area’s first apartment building, and its success was not guaranteed.

Chicagoans tended to associate apartment living with dreary tenements for the poor rather than luxury dwellings. And while the middle and upper-class residents of London, Paris, and New York were increasingly content to move into apartments, Chicagoans preferred single family residences that underscored the city’s motto, “urbs in horto”.

“The fact is firmly established,” Everett Chamberlain announced in his 1874 guidebook Chicago and its Suburbs “that ninety-nine Chicago families in every hundred will go on an hour’s drive into the country … rather than live under or over another family.”

The job of convincing them otherwise fell to developers anxious to capitalize on soaring land values in popular neighborhoods after the Chicago Fire of 1871. According to architectural historian Carroll William Westfall, author of “Home at the Top: Domesticating Chicago’s Tall Apartment Buildings” (Chicago History Magazine, Spring, 1985), one way to do so was to make the apartment building look as much like a single-family home as possible.

Architect Cyrus P. Thomas designed The Houghton with a broad front porch, an architectural feature prized by the upper crust as a courting spot. He added bay windows to provide a familiar parlor solarium. And his chosen style was Richardsonian Romanesque, just like many of the neighboring homes.

To further enhance The Houghton’s appeal, A. I. Marble, who had paid $45,000 for the lot, marketed the building residences as a “flats”, a term preferred in England and, more significantly, in France, widely regarded as The Most Chic country in Europe. Thomas spent the summer of 1875 in Paris, studying style. He saw that big rooms were a must. So were light and air.

Advertised as “The Houghton Apartment Flats,” with the name carved proudly in the sandstone arch above the door, the five-story stone and brick structure offered “nine sunny rooms, steam heat and high ceilings.” There were two apartments per floor, with the top floor devoted to smaller rooms for servants. No records can be found as to the rent paid by the earliest tenants. In 1900, an advertisement in the Chicago Daily Tribune listed one vacant apartment in the building described as “elegant,” with a passenger elevator and “wood floors throughout.” But no price was included.

The Houghton is featured prominently on the CAC Gold Coast: Dearborn Street tour, and no wonder. It was the forerunner of apartment buildings in that area during a boom that continued until the Great Depression. As apartment buildings became taller, and living in them became not just acceptable but fashionable, the need for apartments to masquerade as single family dwellings disappeared. Yet today, the homey Houghton remains a fine address.

A recent listing advertised a two bedroom, two bath unit for $499,000.