The narrow gangway between Chicago buildings is the most neglected space on most properties — and the one most likely to cause water damage, rodent problems, and 311 complaints. Here is how to keep it clean year-round.
If you own or manage a two-flat, three-flat, or courtyard building in Chicago, you know the gangway — that narrow passage between your building and the one next door, just wide enough for a garbage cart and a person turning sideways. It is one of the most distinctly Chicago pieces of residential architecture, and the single most overlooked area on most properties.
Gangways do not get cleaned because nobody quite owns them. Owners focus on the front stoop and the back porch, because that is what people see. Cleaning crews sweep the front sidewalk and stop at the property line. The gangway quietly accumulates years of debris, and the first anyone hears about it is when a garden unit floods or a tenant complains about the smell in July.
In Logan Square, Wicker Park, and Bucktown, where frame two-flats sit six or seven feet apart, gangway conditions affect both buildings — yours and your neighbor's.
Walk a gangway that has not been serviced in a year and the inventory is remarkably consistent across the city.
Wind-driven litter is the biggest volume by far. Gangways act like funnels — anything blowing down the block gets trapped between two brick walls and stays. Near commercial strips like Clark Street in Andersonville or Milwaukee Avenue in Logan Square, that means wrappers, cups, and bags in real quantity.
Underneath the litter you will usually find several seasons of leaf pack from parkway maples and lindens, matted into a dense layer that holds moisture against the foundation. Add to that: cigarette butts, dog waste, abandoned tenant property, dryer lint blown out of side wall vents, pigeon droppings from the utility lines overhead, and — after March — a gritty residue of road salt tracked in all winter.
Each is a nuisance on its own. Together they create the two problems that actually cost money.
Most Chicago gangways are pitched to move water somewhere — toward a small catch basin, toward the alley, or toward a grade break at the rear. Many also take downspout discharge. When leaf pack and litter block that path, the gangway stops being a drainage channel and becomes a shallow basin holding water against your foundation wall.
That is how garden and basement apartments get wet. Owners of Ravenswood and Rogers Park greystones spend real money on interior waterproofing for a problem that started with a clogged gangway drain and a downspout discharging six inches from the wall during a summer storm.
The winter version is worse. Standing water freezes, and freeze-thaw cycling works on concrete and mortar joints the same way it works on the street outside. You get spalled slabs, deteriorated tuckpointing at the base of the wall, and a sheet of ice in the one passage tenants use to reach the back stairs. Clearing the drain in October is a fraction of the cost of repointing in May.
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