Once the heart of Chicago’s Nord Seite, Lakeview was crowded with German joints like Math Igler’s Casino. Not that kind of casino, though–Igler’s was sauerbraten and singing waiters rather than slots.
It only took a cataclysmic earthquake, a catastrophic fire, and a sensational murder on the other side of the country for a woman to get the commission for San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.
A tidy example of the early postwar modernism that characterized commercial architecture in Chicago’s outermost neighborhoods that's in better shape than the discontinued car brands it initially sold…but only barely.