The blocks around Oakley and Cortez in the heart of Ukrainian Village contain some of the most intact early 20th-century residential architecture in Chicago — workers' two-flats, three-flats, and small apartment buildings from 1900 to 1920, built by and for the neighbourhood's Eastern European immigrant working class. The brick construction, bay windows, decorative cornices, and modest front gardens are characteristic of Chicago's pre-war residential vernacular.
The scale is consistently modest: these are not the merchant-class houses of Wicker Park or the mansions of Lincoln Park, but the ordinary fabric of working-class urban life built to last. Walking the grid of streets between Chicago Avenue and Division, from Damen to Western, takes an hour and covers the core of the neighbourhood as it was built. The contrast with the high-rise and townhouse development that has replaced this fabric in other Chicago neighbourhoods is clarifying.