Credit: Positive Image Photography
July 29, 2023 11:43 AM
A notable literary landmark, the house where Carl Sandburg lived when he first wrote that Chicago is the “City of the Big Shoulders,” sold Friday.
The six-bedroom, 4,500-square-foot house on Hermitage Avenue sold for $2.25 million, or about 96% of what sellers Susan Sattell and Chip Hunter were asking when they listed the house in mid-May.
The buyers are not yet identified in public records. Their agent, Sharon Chen of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, said they were not immediately available for comment on whether the literary tie played any role in their purchase decision.
Carl Sandburg was about 34 in 1912 when he moved with his wife, Lillian, and daughter, Margaret, into an apartment on the house's second floor. While working as a reporter for the Chicago Day Book, Sandburg also was composing a poem called "Chicago" that would become inextricably linked with the city's image of itself. The poem was first published in Chicago-based Poetry magazine in March 1914.
In the poem, Sandburg described Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads,” imagery that has clung to the city’s self-image ever since.
In 1915, the Sandburgs moved to Maywood, where they bought a house. Carl went on to be awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1959 he spoke to the joint houses of Congress about Lincoln on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
As the place where Sandburg launched his career in poetry and created an indelible description of this city, the house ranks as one of the Chicago area’s most important literary landmarks, along with homes of such lights as Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros and Nelson Algren, and the Lake Forest mansion that was home to the socialite who inspired the character Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
In May, Sattell, who is a writer, said that while living in the house she felt "the influence of someone who was such a wonderful writer and had such a sense of humanity."
In 2013, 98 years after the Sandburgs moved out, the house was still a multi-flat residence. That year Sattell and Hunter bought it for $685,000.
They put it through a gut rehab and modernization inside, but using old photos, they restored the exterior to an approximation of its early 20th-century look. They removed metal siding and a concrete and metal porch and put up period-appropriate wood siding and a vintage-style porch.
"We kept the original front doors and the entryway (inside) and stairs," Sattell said in May, keeping it close to what it would have been when the Sandburgs passed through on their way upstairs.
In the conversion from multi-flat to single-family home, the Sandburgs' second-floor apartment became two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The front bedroom, Sattell said, was the apartment's living room and is most likely where Sandburg wrote.
The house went on the market May 16 and went under contract June 11. The sale closed July 28.
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July 29, 2023 at 09:20PM
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Ravenswood house where Carl Sandburg lived sells - Crain's Chicago Business
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