Chicago Community Area #36 - Oakland

I continued eastward on 47th to Drexel Blvd which is in the Kenwood neighborhood, but I didn't stop or take any photos in Kenwood on this day. Turning north on Drexel Blvd, I rode north into Oakland, a small community along the lakefront from 35th to 43rd. There's a small Chicago Landmark neighborhood in Oakland but it took me a while to find the houses I was looking for on 4100 block of S Berkeley. It started raining fairly hard and I took cover along the old railroad embankment along 41st Street. This embankment once held the Kenwood line of the Chicago L, but it was abandoned in 1957. The side of the embankment along Drexel has been painted with a strongly-themed mural.

While I was tooling around looking for 4100 Berkeley, I found a marker commemorating the place where Hannah Greenebaum Solomon lived at 4060 S. Lake Park Avenue. Ms. Greenebaum was a social reformer who lived from 1858-1942. She was the founder of the National Council of Jewish Women. She worked on behalf of Jane Addams's Hull House (which I intentionally passed on my way home) and she represented the United States at the Internation Council of Women in Berlin in 1904. The other representative was Susan B. Anthony. Being fluent in French and German, Greenebaum translated for Anthony at the conference.

I finally found the 4100 block of S Berkeley and found several homes designed by Cicero Hines. They all have a distinctive cottage feeling and several of them have been rehabbed nicely. I can't decide if the house in the photo I took is the same as the one in this photo. In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo quotes an 1887 Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper:

Eleven Berkeley cottages on Berkeley avenue between 41st and 42nd streets. Some of them are built partially of stone and others entirely of stone. The houses embody in a marked degree the elements of the attractive and popular along with the economical and substantial.... Throughout, the Queen Anne architecture of all these houses is as attractive as it is diversified.

Pattillo continues and writes:

Despite the modest size and charm of these cottages, the owners were principals in law firms, presidents of corporations, and high-ranking officials. Such distinguished Chicagoans lived throughout North Kenwood and Oakland at the end of the nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, on my way north out of Oakland, I hit something hard with my back tire and ended up with a flat tire around 37th and Cottage Grove. I walked the bike to 35th and crossed the bridge over the railroad and Lake Shore Drive to the east over to the Lakefront Path. I changed the tube there and just as I was finishing up, it back pouring rain again. I took cover at the 31st Street beach house. The rain didn't last long so I was on my way again relatively quickly.