Alta Vista Terrace Historic District

Alta Vista Terrace is a short, tree-shaded street in Chicago lined with forty narrow rowhouses, twenty on each side, each on a lot about 24 feet wide and 40 feet deep. Real estate developer Samuel Eberly Gross bought the block in 1900 after seeing London rowhouses, and he ran a street down the middle so no house would face the railroad or the alley. Eighteen two-story houses fill each row, with two three-story houses at the center. The brick facades come in twenty designs, repeated in reverse order on the opposite side, and draw on Classical Renaissance, late Gothic and Adam motifs such as pilasters, pediments, Palladian windows and leaded-glass fanlights. Some windows, awnings and gables have been altered, and one facade carries false half-timbering, yet the exteriors are little changed. The street was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey as the Street of 40 Houses and is valued as a unified whole unlike any other in Chicago.