Sometimes a house stands at the crossroads of so many architectural movements that it is difficult to know which aspect to discuss first. Such is the case with the bungalow at 2128 W. 109th St., built for Eugene W. and Ella L. Hanna in 1904.
Although the bungalow received something of a bad name after Woodrow Wilson accused Warren G. Harding of having “a bungalow mind” during the presidential campaign of 1920, the original spirit was quite progressive. The bungalow in America represents the break between the mammoth homes of the Victorian era, typically managed by what author Dorothy L. Sayers calls “fatigue-proof servants,” and the modern house of today, equipped with labor-saving devices and capable of being run by one person.
The bungalow appeared in quantity before modern electric appliances had made their appearance, but design compensated for the lack of servants. They often had fold-away ironing boards and strategically-located closets and cupboards so that frequently-used articles were close at hand. They typically contained less floor space and required less cleaning.
The term “bungalow” originated in India as “bangala,” which simply means “of Bengal.” It referred to a type of house which was roughly one and a half stories in height, had no basement and had a roof sweeping over a verandah. Isolated examples appeared in Great Britain, Canada and the United States around 1880, and a few Chicago-area examples are known from late in the 1880’s.
Obviously, the requirement for a furnace in our climate meant that examples in our region have basements. The Hanna House is a true bungalow.
The architect was George Washington Maher, a leading figure of the Prairie School of architecture, and one of the few not employed by Frank Lloyd Wright or one of his students. Maher was born in West Virginia in 1864, and moved to New Albany, Indiana, with his family shortly after the Civil War. At the age of 13 he began working as an apprentice for a Chicago architectural firm, and later was employed in the offices of Joseph Lyman Silsbee at the same time Wright was a draftsman there. In 1889, he opened his own firm, doing much of his business in the Hyde Park and Near South Side areas. In 1893 he moved to Kenilworth on the North Shore, and that community has the greatest concentration of Maher-designed buildings.
Besides being a true bungalow, the Hanna House is a clear example of Prairie School architecture. Its exterior is low to the ground and built of stucco and natural materials such as stone. Its interior is characterized by functional spaces with a freedom of circulation.
Fortunately, George Washington Maher is currently being extensively researched by the architectural historian Kathleen Roy Cummings, who has seen all of the four Maher houses on the Ridge.
The Hanna House was built in the summer of 1904, almost simultaneously with the Heffron House on Longwood Drive. About this time a draftsman named Robert Seyfarth from Blue Island came into Maher’s employ, and it is possible the convenient presence of Seyfarth to superintend construction had something to do with Maher expanding his practice to the Ridge.
The appearance of this full-blown Chicago bungalow in 1904 comes as something of a surprise, because bungalows are commonly thought to be the first fad, even before movies, smog, surfing and freeways, to be foisted on the rest of the country by California. While the most distinguished practitioners of bungalow architecture in California, the Los Angeles-based firm of Greene and Greene, first began turning out the remarkable houses in 1903, none of them were widely published before 1905, so it is practically impossible for them to have provided Maher with his inspiration. The Hanna House may turn out to be something of a regional landmark, but a detailed study of the Chicago bungalow needs to be done first.
(Harold Wolff is a researcher for the Ridge Historical Society.)
