Henry B. Clarke House, The Building That Outran the L

The pale Greek Revival house ahead, set back on its own green lawn, is the oldest building standing in Chicago, and it has not always stood here. Henry Clarke, a hardware merchant who arrived in the city in eighteen thirty three, built the house around eighteen thirty six, years before the Great Fire, back when this kind of wood frame structure with columns out front was still a statement of ambition on the prairie. It has since been moved twice to survive, each time just ahead of demolition.

The harder move came in December of nineteen seventy seven, when the city relocated the entire house from its previous spot on Wabash Avenue to this block on Indiana Avenue, inching the whole structure along city streets and past the elevated tracks that cross the route nearby. The move happened in brutal cold, and at one point the hydraulic jacks holding the house up off the ground actually froze solid, stalling the crawl until crews could warm the equipment enough to keep going. It is, by most accounts, the oldest building that has ever been relocated through the streets of Chicago, let alone twice. Today it operates as a house museum, its narrow rooms furnished the way an eighteen thirties merchant family might have kept them, a piece of frontier Chicago that two separate generations of the city decided was worth the trouble of saving rather than tearing down. Every other building from Clarke's Chicago is long gone, which makes this one slow, cold, nineteen seventy seven crawl across the city the reason any of it survives for you to see today.