Prairie Avenue, The Street Millionaires Abandoned

The quiet blocks around you were once called the most expensive street west of Fifth Avenue, and almost nobody who lived here stayed long enough to see that reputation outlive them. After the Great Chicago Fire cleared out the city's old wealthy districts, Prairie Avenue became the fashionable address to rebuild on, and by the eighteen eighties it carried more than fifty mansions, a stretch guidebooks of the era nicknamed Millionaire's Row. Sleeping car magnate George Pullman and retail giant Marshall Field both kept grand houses here, within easy walking distance of each other, at the center of Chicago's most concentrated single block of old industrial fortune.

The street's fall happened almost as fast as its rise. When Bertha Palmer, wife of hotel and real estate baron Potter Palmer, built her own mansion up on the Gold Coast near Lake Shore Drive instead of here, the city's social gravity shifted north with her, and other Prairie Avenue families followed within a generation. Houses that had cost fortunes to build were cut up into rooming houses or torn down outright through the early twentieth century. A handful of survivors, including the Glessner and Clarke houses nearby, were eventually preserved as a historic district, which is the only reason you can still see, standing in a row, what the street looked like in the few decades when it was the wealthiest address in the entire city. What remains today is a kind of time capsule by accident, saved not because the city planned it that way but because preservationists stepped in just before the last of Millionaire's Row would have disappeared for good.