Nineteenth-century Chicago greystone sells for $699k after 20 days on market

A 19th-century greystone in Chicago’s East Garfield Park has a new lease on life.

The four-bedroom home, restored over the course of a decade by stonemason Robert Franklin, sold for $699,000, below the $750,000 asking price, after 20 days on the market, Crain’s reported. Homes in East Garfield Park that sold in the first three months of 2022 sat on the market for an average of 141 days.

Inside the property (Zillow)

Franklin bought the vine-covered house for $48,000 in 2011 as a personal project after deciding that “all the original detail was salvageable,” Franklin said.

Some details, like lacy wood trim in doorways, survived the years but took a long time to restore. “It had a lot of paint on it, but nobody had ever bashed it up,” he said. Restoring the wood inside the home took Franklin four years.

Inside the property (Zillow)

Franklin restored most of the home himself, with help from friends and co-workers. Restoration included cleaning and repairing the exterior stone and installing new utilities and a new roof. Franklin also added a new kitchen and four bathrooms.

While the median sale price for homes in East Garfield Park was $302,500 last year, Franklin said his $750,000 asking price reflected the extensive rehab and the size of the lot.

Inside the property (Zillow)

According to research done by Franklin and his friends, the home was designed and built around 1896 by a firm called Crowen & Richards. The same firm also built many other greystones and apartment buildings in East Garfield Park, Woodlawn, Washington Park and Uptown. At the time, those neighborhoods were all considered upper-middle-class areas.

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