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At the behest of @JayDubWard and @VincentDJohnson, I've assembled a selection of some of the most weird-ass houses in Bridgeport, Chicago's most architecturally confused neighborhood. Thread:
Our first feature was a classic Chicago worker's cottage in a past life. At some point, somebody stuck a rectangular closed porch on the front of it. Then, a few years ago, somebody committed design crimes to turn it into what it is today.
Next up, we have a rectangle with an amorphous blob of corrugated metal hovering off-center over the top of it. Is the blob an office? A neighborhood panopticon? Who knows?
A block away from the panopticon, we have what appears to be three buildings stacked on top of each other. You know what everybody wants in a house? A giant set of windows on your master bedroom that directly face your neighbors.
A few decades ago, a bunch of Bridgeport's wealthy (some with mob affiliations) built themselves some truly strange abodes. There's the privacy-over-function aesthetic, the "what if a disco van was a house" aesthetic, and more within two concentrated blocks of postmodernism.
Bridgeport's architectural oddities didn't just start in the '70s, of course. There are plenty of older horses that were either ugly from the start, or received horribly unsympathetic updates over time. I like to think the entrance of the one on the right here is a stove hood.
One very common feature of Bridgeport's street corners is converted convenience stores and bars, many of which have become small houses. Some are executed well. Others...
Every once in awhile, you come across something truly zany. I'm particularly fond of this orange beast, which comes across as almost whimsical. There's also an old workers cottage that has castle turrets attached to it, but I forgot to photograph that one today.
There are also plenty of one-offs that take inspiration from vernacular styles in other parts of the world, executed as plastic surgery on the face of existing Chicago buildings. The yodeling two-flat and not-so-grand palladian apartment building here are both prime examples.
But the worst is yet to come, because Bridgeport's present-day richest residents have zero taste. Take this, for instance. Its style of architecture could be described as "cardboard box".
And then there are these monstrosities, which mimick Georgian and Victorian architecture that has literally never existed in this neighborhood's past. Bonus points for the bright red gutters of the contemporary house on the left edge.
Speaking of monstrosities, check this out. The entire right side of this house, taking up a full city lot, is just a pool. And because of the many windows that surround the pool, I know from walking by many times that instead of swimming, that area is used for watching the news.
A great way to make friends with your neighbors is to build a house that's three times larger than any of theirs, and make the entire street-facing view a big brick wall. I used to live on this block, and people have genuinely asked me if this house is a library or a church.
And a house doesn't have to be oversized to be architecturally outlandish. Look at the angles on this one. It looks like it's ready to transport passengers across the Atlantic.
These people need to just move to the suburbs already. An oval driveway and wraparound yard less than four miles from the Loop? Come on, don't be greedy.
To close things out for now, we return to something a little more mundane. Here's a Bridgeport apartment I used to live in. See that random door on the second floor? I can find no historic record of there ever being stairs there. It's just a mystery door to nowhere.
