“At an 1880s Gold Coast row house, up for sale for the first time since the mid-1980s, the architectural significance is both about what’s still there and what’s not.
“The four-story Astor Street row house, built in 1887, was the longtime home of a Chicago attorney who died earlier this year. His heirs are asking a little under $1.9 million.
“The row house was designed by John Wellborn Root, one of Chicago’s greatest 19th-century architects, and retains many of his selections, not only the stone exterior with a stack of metal-clad bays, but inside, where original fireplaces, wood paneling and staircases and other details have lasted nearly 14 decades.
“What’s missing is its mirror image, what would have been the fourth in a row that is now only three. This row house is on the north end. The one on the south end was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for Astor Tower, a 25-story modernist tower by another great Chicago architect, Bertrand Goldberg.
“Root, a pioneer of skyscraper architecture whose best known works in Chicago are the Rookery and Reliance buildings, didn’t only design the quartet of row houses. He lived in the one next door to Szwajkowski’s listing before he died in 1891 at 41 years old.
“So did Root’s wife, Dora, her sister Harriet Monroe, who founded the magazine Poetry in Chicago in 1912, and John Wellborn Root Jr., the architect of such Art Deco classics as the Palmolive Building, 333 N. Michigan and the former Daily News building on Canal Street.
“The elder Root designed the quartet for real estate developer James Houghteling, according to architecture writer Rachel Freundt.
“The original features ‘are great to still have in there,” Szwajkowski said, but the house ‘is going to be a project for somebody.'” (Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business, 6/9/25)