The big divide in the architecture of Chicago is not between prewar and postwar, or downtown and the neighborhoods, or residential and commercial. It is between those structures built BP (before parking) and AP (after parking). Before parking, stables were so loathed that the city required builders to get the permission of every property owner within six hundred feet to build one in a residential neighborhood. Chicago BP is the metropolis of the imagination: Art Deco skyscrapers, elevated trains, corner bars nestled inside neighborhoods of three-flats and Victorians, low-slung corridors of
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