This 100-Year-Old Tiny Blue Bungalow Is The Last North Side Lakefront House

The house at 5965 N. Sheridan Road is at least 100 years old and survived the high-rise boom of the 1960s and 70s.

Lakefront House

EDGEWATER — If you drove through the northern shores of Edgewater 100 years ago, you'd see an opulent lakeside community for the elite, spotted with mansions and beach homes imagined by the likes of a young Frank Lloyd Wright and George Maher.

But by the early 1960s, the detailed structures that had once housed some of the neighborhood's first settlers had been replaced by the skyscrapers of the Far North Side — high-rise condominiums.

And lots of them.

There was one exception: a small blue bungalow at 5965 N. Sheridan Road.

Linze Rice talks about the little blue house on the lake.

As recently discovered by the Chicago Architecture blog, the tiny house is one of just two single-family detached homes in Chicago with their own private slices of Lake Michigan. The other sits in a well-hidden bend of South Shore.

It's owned by Demetris Giannoulias, brother of former Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias and the former CEO of shuttered Broadway Bank in Edgewater, which once held accounts of Chicago bigwigs like Barack Obama.

During the school year, the house is used by the neighboring Chicago Jewish Day School. A sign reading "Bayit" hangs next to the front door, a Hebrew word for "home."

And a home it certainly is.

The 1,500-square-foot single-story house has two fireplaces, a back porch, ornate black and white painted metallic details around its outer trim and 56 feet of Chicago's own cool blue lake.

Its south-facing windows offer views of Kathy Osterman beach and the John Hancock building.

From the street, the home itself is hard to find: it's set far back from Sheridan Road with a canopy of trees covering a long driveway and the house's facade, also screened in by a wooden privacy fence, brick wall and metal gate.

^{The front of 5965 N. Sheridan Road [DNAinfo/Linze Rice]}

Though the house is mostly hidden from onlookers, save for a bright splotch of blue poking through, there's no way it can hide from the history surrounding it.

Immediately to the north, the Malibu stands 39 stories tall.

In 1965, two years before ground was broken at the massive condominium development, a two-story mansion and local headquarters of the Mormon church were the beach home's neighbors, a Tribune article recalled. Today, the home and condo building stand side by side.

At that time, three 30-story buildings, a set of 18-story buildings and two four-story buildings were being built within a six-block stretch of Sheridan from Hollywood to Devon.

The Tribune reported those developments were slated to add another 800 units to the more than 3,000 that had been added to the area since 1950 — just under half of which had been built between 1960-65 as the high-rise boom accelerated.

That wiped out the majority of structures built and designed by J. Lewis Cochran, Joseph Silsbee, Wright and Maher (except for the Colvin House on the west side of Sheridan, slated for restoration, and Berger Park Cultural Center, saved by resident advocacy).

Giannoulias bought the property for $1 million in 2001, and tried listing it several times over the years at diminishing values, most recently for about $1.65 million in 2010.

In 2008, he tried to sell it for $2.7 million, dropping down to $2.29 million and below by 2009 before de-listing it, according to real estate site Redfin.

The Cook County Assessor's Office values the property at just under $425,000 — though its value as one of the only two true lakefront homes in Chicago remains to be seen.

^{Looking north at the house and the Malibu condos. [DNAinfo/Linze Rice]}