Highwood packs pre-WWII housing onto small lots a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Tight access and old masonry, in one square mile.
Highwood is one of the smallest municipalities we cover, around 5,000 people on a compact grid between Lake Forest and Highland Park. It incorporated in 1886 and grew as a working community alongside the military post at Fort Sheridan, with a long-established Italian-American population that still shapes the restaurant district along Highwood Avenue.
The housing reflects that history. Lots are small, homes sit close together, and much of the stock predates 1940. Compared to the estate properties in neighboring Lake Forest, Highwood chimneys are modest, but they are old, and they are close to the lake.
Two things make Highwood work different from anywhere else on our list. The first is access. On narrow lots with limited setbacks, staging and roof access take planning that a suburban tract house does not require. The second is the lake.
Lake Michigan is under a mile east. East-facing chimney elevations here cycle through freeze and thaw far more often than inland Lake County, and that shows up as accelerated joint loss and crown cracking on one side of the stack while the other three look fine.
Each architectural period in Highwood has predictable chimney failure modes after enough decades of weather. Here is what to look for.
Highwood's oldest chimneys were built with lime-rich mortar and have lost most of their binder. Repointing requires a Type N mix per ASTM C270 that matches the original. Portland-heavy mortar on this brick will spall the faces inside a decade, and on a house this old the replacement brick is difficult to match.
Decorative caps and corbelled detail are common on this stock and they sit outside the flashing line, so they take the worst of the weather. Rebuilding one means salvaging original brick wherever possible, because new brick next to 90-year-old brick is obvious from the street.
This cuts across the whole village. The east elevation of a Highwood chimney will nearly always be in worse condition than the other three. We inspect and price by elevation rather than treating the stack as one uniform surface, because repointing all four faces when one needs it is money spent for no reason.
Highwood chimneys are old and close to the lake, which sounds like an argument for replacement and usually is not. The east face fails long before the rest of the stack, so most of what looks like a failing chimney here is a failing elevation.
The full chimney, fireplace, and commercial service catalog, dispatched from our Park Ridge office to Highwood addresses.
USDA Zone 6a with strong Lake Michigan moderation; lakefront homes see 30 to 50 percent more freeze-thaw cycling on east-facing chimney exposures.
Highwood, IL
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