The Fire's Edge: Old Town and Lincoln Park

Old Town Triangle Historic District

A wedge of wooden workers' cottages and brick row houses that the Great Fire of 1871 never reached, saved by three blocks and a political deal.

You are standing in the Old Town Triangle, a wedge of Chicago that looks nothing like the skyscraper city most visitors expect. This neighborhood was settled in the 1850s by German immigrants who built small wood-frame cottages on narrow lots, many of them workers at the nearby breweries and tanneries. On the night of October 8, 1871, the Great Fire roared north from the O'Leary barn, devouring block after block of wooden buildings. It stopped three blocks short of here.

In the weeks after, while downtown smoldered, Old Town struck a political deal to stay outside the new fire-code boundary that mandated brick and stone. So the cottages you see were rebuilt in wood, in the same modest Italianate style as before. Walk a few steps in any direction and you will spot them: two-story frame houses with pitched roofs, tall narrow windows, and front stoops set right against the sidewalk. In the 1940s, this became one of the country's first neighborhood preservation movements, long before historic districts were fashionable.

The locals have a saying: if you can hear the bells of St. Michael's, you are an Old Towner.

St. Michael's Church

The red-brick Roman Catholic church whose walls survived the Great Fire; its 290-foot spire has anchored Old Town since 1888.

You are looking at St. Michael's Church, the spiritual and physical anchor of this neighborhood. The parish was founded in 1852 to serve the German immigrants who had settled here, on land donated by brewer Michael Diversey, whose name you will still see on a major Chicago street. The first church was a modest wooden building, but by 1869 the congregation had outgrown it and dedicated this far grander brick church with a 200-foot steeple.

For two years it was the tallest building in Chicago, taller even than the Water Tower. Then came the fire. On October 8, 1871, as the flames swept north, priests and parishioners packed the church's treasures into an oxcart and fled. By morning only the stone walls remained; the steeple had collapsed and the bells had melted into a fused mass in the rubble.

Rebuilding began within a week. The congregation incorporated the surviving walls into the new structure, and on October 12, 1873, the church was rededicated. In 1888 they added the 290-foot spire you see now, topped by a gilded cross and a clock built by the famed Milwaukee craftsman Mathias Schwalbach. Inside, five bells cast in 1876 still ring: St.

Michael, St. Mary, St. Joseph, St. Alphonsus, and St.

Theresa.