Sheffield Historic District

Sheffield is a roughly 530-acre neighborhood on Chicago's North Side, in the western part of Lincoln Park. Land once farmed by Joseph and Maria Sheffield filled with housing after about 1868, drawing German immigrants who worked at factories along the Chicago River and families attracted by McCormick Theological Seminary and St. Vincent de Paul parish. Horsecar, cable car and elevated lines added to its appeal. By about 1905, 60 to 70 percent of today's buildings were standing. Italianate wooden cottages, Queen Anne and Romanesque masonry houses, row houses, flats and polychromatic shop buildings line narrow, tree-edged streets, with commercial corridors on Lincoln, Halsted, Armitage and Fullerton. The district was listed because it keeps a consistent scale, materials and street pattern from its original middle class urban era. It declined from the 1920s through the 1950s without major losses, then recovered through rehabilitation from the 1960s onward.