HISTORECYCLE

Chicago’s West Town has been experiencing a boom. Not only are humans moving in, but bees as well. This spring, for example, saw the installation of five active beehives on the roof of the building that the company The Roof Crop calls home. The solid 1928 two-story, in...

Colorful. Comfortable. Inviting. Not adjectives that describe your typical vocational school building. What was originally a nondescript brick hardware equipment factory built in 1908 on Chicago’s southwest side was gutted, cleaned up, and transformed into a modern tra...

Light defines Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. Even on a rainy day the inside of this temple seems bright. Daylight streams through its transparent ceiling, as if from the heavens, into the “house of peace” (Beth Sho...

Time is of the essence for firefighters. In old firehouses like the one at 1700 W. 95th St. on Chicago’s South Side, firemen would sleep upstairs and, at the alarm bell, zip down the fire pole, rev up the fire truck on the ground floor, and zoom out to extinguish the f...

When this old world starts getting you down--especially when it’s snowing in mid-April--think green! Up on the roof of the Uncommon Ground restaurant on Devon Avenue in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, seedlings are about to sprout. Atop this 1909 building, the 800-sq...

At the City Winery in Chicago, what’s behind the scenes is almost as exciting as what’s on stage. The West Loop building was once a nondescript cold storage facility for a food distributor at the edge of the famed meatpacking district. Now the 1920 warehouse has been t...

A hearty toast to Motor Row Brewing for rehabbing a three-story building on Chicago’s near south side in the area known as Motor Row, a national historic district and City landmark. In the early 1900’s, this four-block stretch of the City’s famous Michigan Avenue house...

Downed too many St. George’s Green Chile Pepper vodkas at Obed and Isaac’s in Peoria, Illinois? No problem--you can pray for sobriety without leaving the premises, which started out as a Presbyterian church. The 1889 building, a city landmark that’s also on the Nationa...

Acrophobes and the faint of heart need not apply. All others will be delighted to discover that the alpha male of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, has reinvented itself as a supergreen structure. A top-to-bottom, four-year renovation of the historic landmark beg...

Chicago’s Goose Island--the island, that is, not the beer--has been undergoing a metamorphosis in the last few years. Once a manufacturing mecca, its sweaty, grimy old brick factories are, one by one, being turned from blue collar to white collar. Just across the Chica...