On Saturday, Yuriko and I went to Pullman to participate in the 40th annual Historic Pullman House Tour. For a fairly modest fee, you can walk around the Pullman neighborhood and go into seven privately owned houses, one church, one community center, and the visitor center – which would be accessible anyway and isn’t historic, though it’s a good little museum about Pullman.

You can also take a look at the outside of the Hotel Florence, which has been closed and under renovation for years, and wander around the Pullman factory ruins, which were ruined less by the neglect over the decades than a fire set by a lunatic in 1998. We did all those things over the course of the afternoon, and also squeezed in lunch at the diner-like Cal-Harbor restaurant at the edge of the district.

In the early 1880s, industrialist George Pullman established a company town just to the south of Chicago to build his famed railroad cars. The place has a long and storied history, easy to find described elsewhere. Enough to say that the legacy neighborhood, now in the city and way down on the South Side, features about 900 row houses either two or three stories high, made of brick with limestone foundations, with a lot of late Victorian detail. It is, I’ve read, one of the largest collections of 19th-century residences in Chicago.

The entire neighborhood was nearly Eisenhowered around 1960 to make way for an industrial park. The neighborhood successfully fought its destruction and it lives on, though parts are still dilapidated. Pullman clearly includes some enthusiastic residents.

You might call that a Pullman car.