The Corn Latitudes

And crowds on the sidewalks of the sort that one encounters today only in packed elevators and el cars. About the crowds, sociologist Marco D'Eramo writes:

 

The crowd reigned absolute in a way that makes the present-day Western city appear decidedly mute by comparison. There was a real sense of physical and mental pressure: the fric­tion of millions of skins, both animal and human, pressed together; the smells, the filth and sweat, the fug of engines, the noise. The only valid modern-day compari­son would be . . . an Indian city such as Calcutta.

 

The pollution was not only physical, in the minds of would-be reformers like George Pullman. The industrialist’s eponymous model town didn’t strike many people as very suburban in the stereotypical sense. Its residents were largely factory workers, albeit skilled ones, and it had been part of the City of Chicago for more than a century. Pullman was suburban in inspiration, however. Donald Miller, in City of the Century, retells the familiar story of how Pullman chose the isolated site (with a cordon sanitaire of company-owned land around it) to provide for his workers the same atmosphere of sobriety, healthfulness, piety, and probity—and the social and political repressiveness—that characterized the suburbs towns he and his fellow industrialists were beginning to move to.

 

Catholic leaders too fretted that the crowded city offered too many temptations, from crowded saloons to crowded bedrooms. Historian James Sanders notes that the Catholic New World as early as the 1890s urged the resettlement of Catholic immigrants—many of them peasants from rural arts—in rural areas outside Chicago “to save them from the degenerate city.”

 

Which is what happened. The economic boom that lasted from World War I until the Great Depression carried Catholics in numbers out to new suburban “farms.” (One such was Westwood in Elmwood Park, which for a time was the largest single-home development ever undertaken by a single real-estate firm, being home to more than a thousand families by 1929.) The seminary of the Chicago Roman Catholic Archdiocese is in Mundelein. When the Roman Catholic Society of the Divine Word decided to build a training center for missionaries in 1909, they put it in Techny, just south of Northbrook.

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So many Catholics emigrated that they altered the social balance in many suburbs, and transformed some into suburban versions of the Roman Catholic parish the immigrants had left behind. These were newly middle-class house buyers, not the impoverished and illiterate recent peasants recalled from a generation or two earlier, and ambitious towns were quick to court them. In the 1920s Hillside was advertised as “the modern Catholic village of Cook County.”

 

Much the same process made suburbanites out of the city’s newly-middle-class Jews. Their peregrinations, from working-class to middle-class city neighborhoods to suburbs, recreated at each stop neighborhoods in which co-believers were a substantial minority, even a majority able to sustain its customs and protect itself from anti-semitism. The Kosher groceries, restau­rants, and Hebrew schools that used to have Albany Park or Rogers Park addresses today are found in Skokie, Lincolnwood, and Buffalo Grove. (While Jews are a conspicuous presence on the North Side and in the north suburbs, they are less so in southern Chicagoland, and are practically invisible in the western parts of the region; in 2000 the whole of Du Page County had but two synagogues.)

 

Suburbanites didn’t move just to get away from what was bad about the city. The suburbs promised something good in their own right, something that drew many to them like magnets. It was a simulacrum of their old home, which shone in memory in the rosy light of nostalgia. Few of Chicago’s citizens wanted to be city people. James Gilbert argued in Perfect Cities that Dwight Moody connected with urban audiences in places like Chicago because he evoked nostalgia for the rural life that so many of its people had recently left behind. (The old Bible story of the Prodigal Son particularly resonated with these refugees from the farm.)

 

The move out from the city thus was a move back in time, to an earlier simpler America—all those pseudo-farmsteads complete with livestock (in form of pets) and fields in the form of the backyard garden—from which modernity and its vexations had been banished. To the extent that the city cannot satisfy this urge—and it could not once corporate Chicago was built out to its municipal limits—people are obliged to flee to the suburbs to satisfy it.

 

Central to the re-creation of that farmstead and small town of memory is the house of one’s own with a yard. Cheap houses with yards were as much a draw to residents of the inner city as were the jobs in the many factories that opened on the edge of the city. Land prices made houses with yards too expensive for more than a few; where land prices made it possible, developers built as their suburban cousins across the city line built. The Jackson Park Highlands District on Chicago’s South Side was laid out in 1905 with large suburban-style front yard setbacks, underground utilities, and—remarkably for the city—no alleys, the last made possible because wide lots allowed construction of driveways that penetrated to the rear.

 

Such extravagance is possible only in the first phases of development, when land is still cheap. More often, that kind of profligate use of land was unaffordable. Most Chicagoans of even the middle class were compelled to live in houses that, whatever their other differences—the four-flat, the compact bungalow, the narrow stonefront townhouse—all had yards the size of beach blankets.

 

Already by the 1870s or so, suburban developers had hit on the techniques that are still used with profitable results today—restrictions on the min­imum value of houses erected (a protection against intrusions by the lower classes), restrictions (at first through deeds, today through local ordinance) barring noisome businesses or other nuisances, developer-paid (or at least promised) public amenities, free land for churches and schools.

 

A master of the game was real-estate developer Samuel Eberly Gross. It is hard to think of any one man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who did more to convert Chicago’s remaining countryside into something like a city. Gross’s company built 10,000 houses in more than 21 subdivisions in and just outside the city. (Among them was Brookfield, which bore the name of Grossdale until the burghers of that town decided they would rather not live in an advertisement for the real estate dealer.) He catered to the working and middle classes, with houses that were cheap to buy (thanks to his use of standardized plans and factory materials), conveniently sited, and easy to buy.

 

Even Gross could not sell people houses they could not travel to. Urbanization in both the City of Chicago hinterland and in the suburbs had to await the construction of streetcar and railroad tracks that linked such areas to jobs in the city. (See below for more.) But people needed more than a way to get out to the suburbs, of course, they needed the money to buy a house when they got there. They generally had it during the economic booms of the 1870s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and during the more or less continuous boom that began in the 1950s and continues, thanks in no small part to the subsidy of home mortgage costs by the federal taxpayer. James Sanders notes that the boom years of the 1920s lifted uncounted working-class families not only out of their relative poverty but out of the city. The new Catholic schools used to be built in poor neighborhoods and in the one-step-up working class districts of the city, but in the 1920s the new schools had to be built in the bungalow belt on the fringes of town and contiguous suburbs.

 

The desire for good government—or at least different kinds of government—exerted both a push and a pull on would-be emigrants to the suburbs. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, most of Chicago’s suburbs were minimal communities. They offered little in the way of services beyond roads, and most didn’t do a very good job of that. Most had incorporated as townships—a form of government appropriate to their still-rural character. Incorporating as cities was cumbersome—until 1872 it required a charter from the General Assembly—but also impolitic. City status gave more power (mainly the power to tax) to local government than most rural types wanted to give it. As a result, by the end of 1872 there were but five incorporated townships and five incorporated municipalities in Cook County besides Chicago.

 

It is an axiom of mid- to late 20th century that the suburbs are oases of progressive municipal policy in such fields as education, public health, and parks. ‘Twas not always so. The city of Chicago bested all but a handful of its suburbs in that regard until the Depression. Duis notes that the city of Chicago had imposed strict tuberculosis testing of milk long before most suburbs did, and that as late as 1947 a federal study classified suburban Chicago milk as inferior and pointed out that only a dozen suburban communi­ties even attempted to regulate their milk supplies.

 

What mattered as much to many would-be suburbanites as what government did was how it did it. Suburban areas were neither quite rural nor fully urban. These proto-cities sitting in the midst of farming areas were made up of citizens craved the convenience of urban utilities such as water, sewers, gas, and electricity that surrounding landowners—mostly farmers whose fields were the principal source of local tax revenue—naturally shrank from paying for. Developers often filled the resulting vacuum. but while developers could build infrastructure, they lacked the means to run and maintain it over time.

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Until the mid-nineteenth century, there was no such thing as “suburban government” in Illinois, only urban (chartered or incorporated cities) or rural (counties and townships) governments. The solution was for villages to become Villages, a new incorporation option allowed under Illinois’s 1872 Constitution. The new governmental form was the result of political pressure for new, hybrid forms of local government appropriate to the unusual needs of suburbs. A well-run city must necessarily be granted the power needed to run things, and that most suburbanites are loath to do.

 

The village opened the possibility of providing urban services without the intrusive (and expensive) panoply of urban government. This then-new form of municipal government in Illinois happily suited the would be new suburban towns; 27 new suburbs were to be incorpo­rated as villages by 1890. In Illinois a “village” is not necessarily a community of small size, but one with a small government, which explains why Chicagoland communities such as Bolingbrook—which in 2002 had nearly 63,000 residents—and the 50,000-plus residents of Oak Park—as citified a place as one can find in Chicagoland outside Chicago—are both, officially, villages.

 

Of course, calling a city a village doesn’t make it one, and giving a city a government appropriate to a village only make governing it harder. Which, one suspects, is the point. Suburban government is the political expression of the fundamental anti-urbanism of citizenry that, by and large, either came to the suburbs (in the case of Chicago refugees) because they hated the city or (in the case of small-town immigrants) because they are afraid of it.

 

Sociologist Daniel Elazar is one of the sages who saw in the flight to the suburbs a new expression of an old impulse. The availability of land meant that Americans could always strike out for the frontier when life got too complicated. In the early 1800, the frontier in Illinois had been the open prairies, thanks to the coerced expulsion of the Native American occupants. By the mid-1800s, the frontier of opportunity was economic rather than geographic, having shifted to Illinois’s industrializing cities, pre-eminently Chicago, where opportunity (and peril) awaited the brave. This “urban-industrial” frontier closed with the Great Depression.

 

The newest frontier was technological. It offered new kinds of jobs in new kinds of “factories.” If the model of the old land frontier had been the free-held farm, and that of the second industrial frontier was the stockyards or the steel mills of the South Side, the third is the strip of office parks, research labs and corporate headquarters strung along Chicagoland’s expressways and toll roads.

 

The exodus to the land where the singing from the trees came from birds and not drunks on Saturday night is widely filed under “white flight,” but suburbanization is better described as a class phenomenon. Poor people were hardly new to Illinois. what was new was the way in which the city’s poor were concentrated; like shit in the water  or factory wastes in the air, poor people in such concentration became toxic. it also made them visible, which is why the middle-class the generation beginning in the 1880s were, in Hall’s words, running scared.

 

Literally running—away. Fear of the poor, the angry, the different spurred the physical redistribution of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, first to new city neighborhoods remote from the working-class ghettos and later to the suburbs. “White flight,” so widely understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s, in fact began in the 1870s, as a response of the Chicago’s middle-class—then almost wholly white—to immigrant workers’ unrest. Such panic would not be seen again in Chicago until the 1960s and ‘70s when expansion of the African American population—people likewise seen as foreign and dangerous—sparked a second mass leaving.

 

It is a effect of suburbanization—one hesitates to say “benefit”—that the suburbs were a safety valve, as the physical separation of peoples of disparate values reduced social friction in the city. What that meant could be measured in those parts of the city in which a white population unwilling to move encountered a black one needing to move. white working-class Chicagoans who resisted moves to the suburbs to preserve their neighborhoods against under pressure from an expanding African American population; the result was a continuation of the guerilla warfare between races along the racial borders.

 

Segregation in the suburbs is usually thought of in social terms, but the fact is that life there is segregated in all its aspects. In the 19th century, when Chicago turned toxic, relief was found not in stopping the behavior that creates the mess, which was assumed to an inevitable byproduct of industrial processes, but in separating residences and commerce from it. Zoning, or the segregation of the physical city into officially defined “use zones,” is one of the patented nostrums of the progressive era that has become ubiquitous in the U.S. The segregation of industry from offices and shops, and of both from residences... the result is that people work, play, shop, and sleep in different zones.

 

If Chicago embraced land use zoning to minimize urban problems, its suburbs seized upon it to prevent their creation in the first place. Outside Chicago, local governments used zoning power to simply exclude problematic urban uses altogether. In this they followed a path blazed by developers who had long understood that what you don’t offer customers in a town matters as much as what you do. The house lots offered by the Highland Park Land Company, for instance, were worth their high price in no small part because the company banned liquor sales and manufacturing plants inside their territory.

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Ultimately most of the Chicagoland area was so arranged—separate precincts for houses, for stores, for culture, indeed, whole separate towns devoted to residential use, and not just to residential use but to working-class residences or middle-class residences or upper class residences. Exclusion was not an incidental result of the suburban ethos, it was its organizing principle.

 

As with noxious land uses, so with noxious neighbors. As noted, the desire for social segregation drove dispersal into the steadily receding edge of the City of Chicago for more than a century. The suburbs began as the 19th century equivalent of the gated community. Instead of fences, the residents used zoning and real estate covenants to keep out intruders. Robert Fishman, describing the designer of Riverside, says that Frederick Law Olmsted’s notions of a civilized community required the exclusion of undesirables. In Olmsted’s case, undesirability was embodied in the persons of the “Dutch boarding houses and groggeries” and occupied by Irish squatters who kept pigs and stole the timber” who had overrun the villas in his home of Manhattan.

 

At about that time, the towns of the North Shore had resisted the introduction –intrusion really—of the streetcar into their towns out of fear that city people—you know who I mean—would ride on it seeking to escape the squalor and dirt that their ancestors had worked so mightily to create. (By the 1970s, alas, many a peasant had money enough that he could afford to drive to Lake Forest in his own Mercedes, and how could one stop them then?)

 

Incorporation gave municipalities the legal means to combat such intrusions through exclusionary zoning. So did the attachment of restrictive real estate covenants to private land. The first groups to begin hacking away at such fences were erstwhile working-class Catholics from the city, who as they joined the middle class left the sacred confined of the parish for the suburbs. Catholics were scarce in Chicago’s bedroom suburbs the last time the Cubs won a world series in 1908; by the 1920s middle-class Catholics were as common in Chicago suburbs as lilac bushes.

 

Restrictive covenants were ruled unconstitutional after World War II, but other, less legally problematic means to exclude undesirables are available to suburbs. By controlling the types of housing that may be built in a town, a town government controls the kind of people who will live in it—up to a point. North Shore parents who wish to frighten their children into good behavior tell them the story of Mr. T and the trees. Actor Lawrence Tureaud, professionally known as Mr. T, was the star of a briefly popular TV action show. One of 12 children, Mr. T grew up in the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago and had always wanted to live in a mansion on the North Shore. In 1986 he bought one—Two Gables on Green Bay Road in Lake Forest, the home for some 70 years to one of the meat-packing Armours. Built in 1910 and substantially redesigned in the 1920s and ‘30s by society architect David Adler, the house was graced by a Jens Jensen-designed landscaping plan.

 

Tureaud’s new neighbors, who might otherwise have been sympathetic to a man who was re-living their grandparents’ up-by-the-bootstraps climb, turned against him when he chopped down dozens of trees on the property. Mr. T was cast as a boor and a buffoon for having committed what was universally decried as an act of vandalism, even though it was done on private property. Propriety outweighed property rights in this case, and the town passed anti-tree-cutting ordinances largely to stay the axes of future Mr. Ts. The irony was, from the point of view of historical authenticity, he’d done the right thing. The people who later bought the house from him were keen to restore the Jensen garden, which was suffering from want of sunlight because of the trees that had come to dominate it since it was installed, and which Mr. T had removed. 
 

“Location, location, location”

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“Location, location, location” may be the mantra of the real estate agent, but any location is attractive only to the extent that potential residents can get to it. Transportation—where it goes- how much it costs—thus has been crucial to population dispersal within the city and suburbanization outside it. Maps showing the spread of new transportation systems and maps charting suburban growth are practically identical, so reliably does the latter follow the former.

 

Indeed, so intimately is the link between transportation and suburban development that it is possible to deduce a town’s history by close attention to its physical self. each era produced a characteristic town form shaped by the transportation technology it relied on. in river towns, the downtown is near the banks; in the railroad era, downtowns clustered around the train stations; in the automobile era, downtown hardly exists at all, having never been there to begin with or, in older towns, having been rendered redundant as cars drew shoppers away to new to businesses on the edge of town. In the earlier towns, population density is highest near the town center and thins with distance from it; in the newer ones, population is clumped in dispersed nodes.

 

As with people and business so with towns. Before the railroads, towns were widely dispersed, located as they were on Indian trails, or on rivers and larger streams. Because the railroads attracted settlements along their tracks, a new pattern developed, with towns aligned on the tracks that ran like the spokes of a wheel with the downtown Chicago as the hub. The land between the tracks was largely vacant—until new roads penetrated those gaps, and made it accessible. Settlement again was diffuse as it has been in the early 1800s.

 

Most historians organize the suburban era into four stages according to which transport mode enabled each.

 

Streetcar Suburbs  The effective city limits of Chicago until the middle third of the 1800s were determined by the distances that people could conveniently walk. It was not until 1859 that horsecars— omnibuses pulled over ill-paved streets, later on rails—spurred the city’s first “suburban” boom by bringing land on the farther reaches of the city within reach of commuters. Many new settlements sprouted after the Civil War in what is today the first ring of settlement beyond downtown. By 1871 the city’s built-up area reached all the way to West­ern and Fullerton avenues.

 

Beyond that point lay a suburban wilds. As the 20th century neared, steam and electric streetcars, el lines and interurbans (the last being the in-town and between-town versions of electric railway) were built. All were faster than the old horsecar, and when they began running in Chicago around 1890—no horsecar could be said to “run”—the new machines brought vast new tracts into development, both on the fringes of the city proper and just beyond it.

 

Dozens of new residential suburbs took root—West Town (East Hum­boldt), Maplewood (now part of Logan Square), Avondale, Portage Park, Jeffer­son Park, and Norwood (Norwood Park). Geographers Mayer and Wade explain that many of these settlements date from the 1840s, but it was not until a generation later, when new streetcar and other transit lines linked them conveniently to the city center, that they became attractive places to build. Even so, in 1900 the settled areas of Chicago reached to its own city line only on the west and (nearly) on the north lakefront.

 

Railroad suburbs  By mid-19th century, The steam railroads had caused new towns to sprout across rural Illinois like weeds along the tracks, at water stops, freight depots, transfer points. (Ann Durkin Keating counted 59 new towns in Cook County alone in the forty years after 1840.) “Commuter villages” sprouted along rail lines like goldenrod. Real-estate man Everett Chamberlin wrote one of the first descriptive accounts of Chicago’s suburbs in 1874; all sixty-four suburban towns he cataloged were located on railroad lines. The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad spawned Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, and Highland Park; the Chicago Burlington & Quincy linked Aurora and Hinsdale to the city; Kenwood and Hyde Park were stops on the Illinois Central, and the Rock Island railroad gave futures to Morgan Park, Englewood, and Blue Island.

 

Streetcar and railroad suburbs may have both ridden to prosperity on steel rails but they differed in many other ways. One was class; the railroads were more expensive to ride, and so attracted middle- and upper-class riders; the towns served by such vehicles thus tended to be more homogeneous than all but a few of the existing small towns that in so many other ways were their twins. In physical form the new railroad suburbs differed too from urban neighborhoods; intercity railroads made few stops, usually only in the town center, and shops and apartments tended to accrete around the stations. Streetcars made many stops, and the development they spawned tended to continuous ribbon along tracks.

 

Many railroad suburbs were existing (usually farm) towns, transformed by the access to the city into bedroom communities. Glenview was settled in the 1830s, but it remained a farm town until the 1860s, as its immigrant farmers from Germany were connected to the city markets by only a bumpy plank road. In 1872 the Milwaukee Railroad built a one-track line through Glenview in order to haul timber to Chicago for its rebuilding after 1871; local farmers took advantage of the new trains to ship produce, but service was not frequent enough to make life there feasible for daily commuters. Glenview’s charms as a semi-rural residence remained lay unexploited until 1892 when the Milwaukee Railroad laid a second track to carry day trippers south to the Columbian Exposition. Regular daily trips to Chicago attracted commuters and Glenview’s farmers found, as so many have, that their most profitable crop was their land, which they sold to developers for house lots. That story can be repeated, with minor variations, in the histories of dozens of suburbs.

 

Of course, merely being linked by a rail line to the city was not enough; service had to be frequent and fairly comfortable before riders would consider moving to a place that made twice-daily trips necessary. But the lines did not dare to make the investments in such service without some assurance that people would use them. The solution was the commuter tickets, via which the lines offered discounts on each ride to encourage more riders to fill trains and cover the high fixed costs of the service. These tickets, which became common in the 1870s, were as crucial as the steady improvements in reliability and comfort of the trains themselves. Keating notes that the value of property in mid-1800s suburbs was roughly in inverse proportion to commutation fares.

 

Transit and development went hand in hand, often because they were attached to the same person. A good example is Samuel Insull. In 1916, Insull acquired control of the bankrupt Chicago & Milwaukee Electric Railroad, which ran from Milwaukee to the Loop to Church Street, Evanston. He owned the Chicago els too, and the interurban in 1919 began running all the way into the city on the Northwestern Elevated's tracks. The direct link made the commute handy, which was key to Insull’s business plan.

 

But Insull was only incidentally a transit king. His first, and main business was making electricity. He bought interurban railroads because they used it, but he figured the real money was not to be made selling el tickets to commuters, but in developing land along his right-of-way, and selling electric power generated by his Public Service Company of Northern Illinois to the new towns his trains would seed there. (The synergies were several; the interurbans’ trackage right-of-ways also were ready-made paths for power transmission lines and towers; the North Shore Line’s Skokie Valley right-of-way is still used for that purpose by Commonwealth Edison.)

 

Not content to provide the conditions that developers could exploit, Insull in the mid-1920s became a developer himself. He bought land and laid out the residential community of Westchester in western Cook County. He built a branch of his Metropolitan elevated line to connect the new town to the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin interurban. (The branch line ran from the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin line Bellwood station to near the current intersection of Mannheim and Cermak.) Insull sold house lots on 2,000 acres to former executives and high-ranking officials of his own companies—even his son, Samuel Insull, Jr., who built a house on an island in artificial 495-acre lake.

 

Auto/Freeway Suburbs  The automobile, it is said, changed everything, but it did not change everything at once. The rise of automobile suburbs had to await until everyone had an auto. The first “automobile suburbs” began to form before WWI, Elmhurst, which more than tripled in size during the 1920s to more than 14,000 people, was only one of the Chicago suburbs that went from backwater to boomtown in that decade. Depression and World War II were potholes in the road to the automobile era; not until affluence after that war made a car affordable by the middle class did the fun begin.

 

The car’s freedom to go anywhere also was limited for decades by Illinois’s very primitive roads, which resulted in turn from a primitive attitude by government toward building them. The largest suburbanizing groups—working class Catholics—rode out of town to their new futures in the 1920s on the few elevated and streetcar lines that penetrated the suburban frontier. Chicago’s first expressway was not built until the 1930s, in the form of Lake Shore Drive, and it remained the only one for years, as the Depression brought other kinds of road-building to a temporary halt. Development in Morton Grove, Skokie, and Niles, for example, was delayed until the opening of the new Edens Expressway.

 

The fact that new roads mean new development—once an insight possessed only of urban planning professionals—is today now widely understood by fearful homeowners. A substantial faction of Chicagoland opinion is opposed to the extension and expansion of the region’s old roads or construction of  new ones, for fear their hometowns will be overrun by new malls and condos and the roads hogged by drivers in the same way that the complainers hogged the roads of their predecessors.

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Special Towns, Specialized Places

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Bland many of them may be, but uniform Chicago’s suburbs are not. From the start economic and social specialization shaped dozens of other Chicagoland communities. Even a brief survey of town types reveals a diversity that belies their collective image. In addition to the stereotypical bedroom community, the suburban catalog includes fun centers, factory towns, and farm markets. Chicagoland had quarry towns and canal towns, resorts and religious retreats, government seats and retail centers. In her book Chicagoland, Ann Durkin Keating reported that of 233 communities founded in Chicagoland in the 1800s, only 15 percent were commuter towns of the stereotypical sort. Two-fifths were farm centers, nearly a third were factory towns, and the rest had their origins in camp grounds, resorts, or commercial picnic grounds, cemeteries, colleges, orphanages, or hospitals of various kinds.

 

Camp Grounds and Resorts

 

Keating reports in Chicagoland that, outside of the downtown area, at least thirty-two neighborhoods and suburban areas in Chicagoland began because of recreational or institutional uses—camp meet­ings, golf courses, picnic groves, beer gardens, amusement parks, cemeteries, and religious and public institutions—around which towns gradually accreted.

 

One of those uses was summer escape. It is impossible to imagine today how fetid Chicago must have been in the summers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Chicago River turned into a cesspool and garbage rotted in the streets. Opening a window was more often nauseating than refreshing, yet to linger inside a closed room in a Chicago summer without electric fans must have been purgatory. Escape was a universal impulse, and those who could afford it flocked to outlying areas where the breezes were cooler and cleaner. Daytrippers were joined by better-off families that did not linger at the resorts for a week or two, but spent the entire summer there, with father commuting in and out of the city by train.

 

The lake shore was the obvious refuge, and many suburbs such as Highland Park, Kenilworth, and (on the south side) Hyde Park began life as resorts. Water drew visitors inland too. Dozens of small pothole lakes survived in Lake County, created when chunks of buried glacial ice melted. The shallow lakes froze in winter, and when rail links to the city were built, that ice was harvested and shipped from such places as Round Lake, Antioch, Crystal Lake, and Lake Villa. Developers were quick to realize that the railroads that carried ice out in the winter could also bring in people in the summer, and they hustled to make area lakes the centerpieces of new resort towns like Grayslake, Richmond, Antioch, and many others.

 

Summers in Chicago in the 1870s were no more sober than they are today, and  those of a temperance bent headed for retreats at a Methodist camp meeting grounds; there were several in Chicagoland, including one at Lake Bluff, to which one could repair by train or lake steamer. The health-conscious repaired to spas; one was in Woodstock, where in 1873 an ornamental Spring House was built on the town square atop the mineral spring that bubbled up there. Native Americans used to walk miles to drink from it; Chicagoans took trains.

 

Most escapes however sought only relief from the steamy city. Round Lake, Cary, Algonquin, and Antioch were popular destinations in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, Fox Lake’s summer of population of season-long “cottagers” was swelled by thousands of week-enders who trooped into town by train to fish, boat, swim, and camp. “On the Fourth of July,” wrote the Guide in 1937, “the whole of Chicago seems to crowd its beaches, bathhouses, barbecue palaces, dance halls, and picnic grounds.” Among the frolickers were wealthy Chicago businessmen, including Al Capone, who escaped the heat in a literal sense at the Mineola Hotel.

 

Summer visitors were a rich crop, and many a farm family augmented their incomes by harvesting them, opening their homes to boarders and creating picnic groves on suddenly useless pastures. Governments catered to the crowds too. To accommodate the sweaty masses the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s developed Chain-O’-Lakes State Park on reclaimed land, making a start on a park that would eventually border three natural lakes—Grass, Marie, and Nippersink—and the Fox River, which connects another seven lakes (Bluff, Fox, Pistakee, Channel, Petite, Catherine, and Redhead) that make up the Chain. The state park was an innovation in those days; until the park opened, not a foot of lake shore was available to the public without charge.

 

The summer resorts were undone by electricity (and the fans and air conditioners it made possible) and by the automobile, which brought more appealing summer places within reach. In many resorts the cottagers have been replaced by full-year residents, transforming the towns from seasonal to suburban.

 

A typical example is Lake Zurich, which is now in its third incarnation—first a farming town, then a resort, now a bedroom suburb and retail center. The town was founded in 1896 by farmers and saw its first serious growth in the 1920s, when it became known as a resort town thanks to its 250-acre lake. The population increased to 18,000 in 2000, and median family income jumped from $58,400 to $84,000, according to U.S. census figures. What is charming in a resort is unbecoming to an upscale suburb, and Lake Zurich officials are proposing to rebuild the village's entire downtown by allowing developers to buy and raze dozens of buildings and replace them with mixed-use structures. The new buildings, in the sort of irony that developers seem insensitive to, are to be designed to give the feel of a quaint resort town.

 

Among the Lake Zurich buildings lost was the American Smokehouse restaurant, aka Farman's Hotel. The structure, built originally as a farmhouse in 1875 at 66 W. Main Street, used to be known as the Lakeside Inn; it was the first and only hotel in town for many years and was popular among jockeys from Arlington Racecourse. The Lakeside Inn became Farman's Hotel in the 1920s. Though symbolically a landmark, the building, in a forlorn physical state, did not meet standards for protected buildings.

 

In southwest Chicagoland, outside Joliet, Shorewood’s name betrays its origins as a summer cottage community along the Du Page River. Incorporated in the late 1950s, Shorewood’s population has swelled nearly a third since 2000, to 10,000 residents. The transition from resort to residential suburb takes more than just installing furnaces and storm windows. Having grown without businesses to speak of, the town has no business district, and sought to acquire an instant downtown in the form of a mixed-use development of some 135 acres.

 

Day trippers still flock to the biggest of Chicagoland’s resort towns for summer fun, drawn by the prospect of bucolic pleasures. (A 1999 magazine article for example touted Chain O’ Lakes as “a destination free from urban noise and traffic.”) Times, and habits, have changed. A summer weekend filled with the noise of car stereos, boom boxes, and boat motors may leave one pining for the quiet of the workday Loop.

 

Resorts of a specialized kind were grounds set aside for religious camp meetings. These were parks, for all their pious purpose. to which believers might repair in summers for sermons, choir singing, and revivals. Such facilities dated back to the 1830s. The Methodists alone had four in Chicagoland, at—one cannot say “in” because in most cases the meetings grounds predated the town—Lake Bluff, Des Plaines, New Lenox and Camp Berger, south of Chicago.

 

Bedroom Communities

 

Chicagoland’s original bedroom suburbs still function primarily as dormitory communities, even if these days they are not exclusively dormitories for Chicago but for other suburbs. The first were arrayed along commuter rail lines, and a few–Riverside is one of many—retain their original character. But houses are lovely to look at but hard to tax, and few bedroom towns with the land to accommodate them have resisted the temptation to develop a retail, office, or industrial side to their personalities to generate more municipal revenue.

 

One example of dozens is Vernon Hills. This Lake County community located south of Route 45 began as a 125-home subdivision. Incorporated in 1958, Vernon Hills grew to include more than 9,800 people by 1980, and in 2000 counted roughly 20,000. Its “business district” consists of business parks—in effect corporate subdivisions—and roadside malls, with the result that its “downtown” is on the outskirts of Vernon Hills.

 

Bedroom suburbs are still being created. The ingredients are the same as in the 19th century—cheap land on the periphery, access to transportation (roads these days as well as commuter trains), and a healthy economy. A classic is Bolingbrook, tucked into the northeast corner of Kendall County. Bolingbrook owes its existence to the construction of I55/Stevenson Expressway and Illinois 53 (an important north-south highway) which cross here. The land hereabouts was still being farmed in the 1960s, and thus cheap when the first builder laid out the first housing tract.

 

What began as "Bolingbrook Subdivision" was incorporated as Village of Bolingbrook in 1965. Bolingbrook didn’t get it own post office until 1980 or its own Zip Code until 1990 but Bolingbrook in the mid-1970s had swelled to include some 30,000 people. Its lack of planning led to traffic chaos, schools were crowded, and disputes over who should provide for water and sewer and how much charge for it roiled local politics for years. The lessons thus learned should prove helpful, for the town is still growing; in 2000 it counted more than 56,000 residents.   

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Factory Towns

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Businesses need homes too, and thousands have set up in Chicago’s suburbs. But the need for more land and cheaper land for expansion forced the relocations of much of Chicago’s industry, and the jobs it offered. Keating’s inventory of Chicagoland towns lists more than sev­enty suburban settlements in Chicagoland (several later absorbed into the City of Chicago) that began as industrial towns—roughly 30 percent of all suburban settlements made in nineteenth-century Chicagoland.

 

In the classic factory town, the factory came first, and its owners built a town to service it. That happened at Grand Crossing, on what is today the South Side around 75th Street. The Corn Products Refining Company built itself a massive new plant just outside the south suburban Summit in 1908. The site had the requisite rail lines and lots of cheap land, but there was no place for employees to live. Trolley rides to it from the nearest towns were expensive and inconvenient, so the owner, E. T. Bedford, built barracks-style housing and later laid out lots for single family houses in what he called, with a singular lack of poetry, the Corn Products Subdivision. The unincorporated site was unofficially known as Argo, after the firm’s leading product, until it was annexed by Summit in 1911, but even today the district is often referred to as Summit Argo. (An area south of the plant was developed as another housing project in 1919; this grew into the future town of Bedford Park, named after the CPC president.)

 

Often in Chicagoland however, speculative developers laid out a town first, and developers then dangled enticements to manufacturers to locate there. There are many such in Chicago’s hinterland, where business owners found lower taxes, cheaper labor, and room to expand that the built-up city could no longer offer. One of dozens was Maywood, founded in 1869 by the Maywood Land Company, which convinced a plow company and a tin can factory to build there.

 

Few factory towns were fine places to live for the frugal and the temperate—see Utopias about Harvey, for example—and the worst of these towns were hardly better than thecity slums they replaced. However, industrial towns occupied positions in between, writes historian Joseph Biggott, mainly because it was in the interest of the boss-landlord to attract the better class of worker.

 

The southern reaches of Chicagoland are to the factory town what the North Shore is to the upscale residential retreat. The Calumet area includes the communities of Pullman, Riverdale, South Chicago, South Deering, East Side and Hegewisch. Remote from the rest of the city, cut off from its and each other by a tangle of canals and expressways and sprawling factory sites, the Calumet has long included some of  Chicago’s most isolated neighborhoods. Chicagoland has its share of gated communities, for example, but the Calumet has the region’s only moated community—East Side, which is reachable only by a drawbridge across the Calumet River.

 

Such towns rose, and often fell, with the firms that surrounded. Housing for workers had to be built with the plants, there being nothing like a town in the Calumet when it was developed. The larger companies did the job themselves, buying and developing land near their factories. The most infamous of these company towns was Pullman. (See elsewhere this section for more.) Hegewisch—heg-wish, please, not hedge-a-witch—was founded in 1883 on 1,600 acres at what is currently 135th and Brandon. It was developed by and named after Adolph Hegewisch, president of the United States Rolling Stock Company, which, with taverns, constituted the settlement’s economy. The town never thrived—Hegewisch’s firm foundered, a talked-about canal that would have put the town into a mini-Bridgeport was not built, and railroad tracks cut the town off.

 

Marktown was a hamlet developed in East Chicago, Indiana, by Mark Manufacturing Company (later Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company)  in 1917 to a plan by Howard Van Doren Shaw, who must have found designing a workers village on the south shore an invigorating challenge after so many commissions for houses for the North Shore. Also in Indiana was built probably the best-known company town of the Calumet, built to house workers of the massive U.S. Steel plant there. he firm’s Gary Land Company planned a new town to be named, as was the custom among these anything-but-modest men, after the chairman of the board of the company.

 

Their hopes for the project were revealed in the marketing come-on, which promised a “City of the Century;” the realities are revealed in the titles of historical inquiries such as "The Failure of Industrial City Planning: Gary, Indiana, 1906-1910." Gary’s population reached 175,000 in 1970, but racial antagonism, the shrinkage of the economic base, and endemic political corruption prompted an exodus that saw the population slip to 102,000 by 2000.

 

Like all factory towns, fate affected by company decisions in most literal ways; the area on the west bank of the Calumet River at 109th Street was known as Browns Mills after the steel firm that founded it in 1875 (locals used the more poetic “Irondale”) and when the ownership of the plant changed so did the name of the town. The works was bought in 1902 by the Deering Harvester Company, soon to become part of the new International Harvester Co.; in 1903, community leaders renamed the area South Deering.

 

What is now the southern Cook County suburb of Chicago Heights dates to the 1830s, when Scots-Irish families settled near where the Sauk Trail crossed the Vincennes Trail. Known in previous incarnations as Thorn Grove and later Bloom, the spot became Chicago Heights in the early 1890s, when a syndicate of Chicago businessmen formed the Chicago Heights Land Association. They promoted the town as a prime factory site on the strength of its being crisscrossed by four main railroad lines. Several firms opened plants there, including Inland Steel and companies making glass, metal products, and chemicals.

 

The workers who flocked to these factories quickly became homeowners, thanks to the helpful attentions of local real estate developers. Chicago Heights boomed—it had 20,000 residents by 1920—but hit the same bumps in the road as the rest of Chicagoland beginning in the 1920s. Prohibition-related crime, centered among the large Italian population, caused scandal. (On one of his raids, G-man Eliot Ness targeted no fewer than eighteen stills in Chicago Heights.) The damage the mob did to the town’s reputation was nothing like the damage the Great Depression did to its economy, however, although World War II temporarily restored local factories to their previous vigor.

 

After World War II, once-outcast immigrants rose to political and business influence in Chicago Heights, but as so often happens, they thus won the honor of presiding over a dying town. The post-war era saw Chicago Heights hit by all the ills that put rust on the Rust Belt. The steel companies relocated to newer, more efficient plants around Lake Calumet. Its once-lively downtown was enervated by malls. Social stress from racial change discouraged homeowners, and redevelopment was hampered because so much of its ground had been poisoned by industrial dumping. No wonder population dropped from nearly 41,000 in 1970 to less than 33,000 in 2000.

 

As noted, the same attractions that appealed to suburban homebuyers—lower costs, including taxes, and a more responsive local government—appealed to businesspeople too. But it was not only cheap land and compliant city officials that attracted business to the suburbs. Most of those tens of thousands of houses contained at least one employable female who was capable of the assembly work then required by most firms. This new source of the docile, cheap labor of the sort that firms had previously looked to immigrants to do was crucial. The new Western Electric plant in Cicero, for example, hired thousands of women, anticipating a trend that would accelerate across the Chicagoland area after World War II.

 

The result was a new sort of factory town. The local model here is the former dairy center of Bensenville, which, as the home to more than 1,200 firms, is today one of the ten largest industrial com­munities in Illinois. Its residential population in 2000 was about 21,000, but during the workday its population swelled to 60,000. The Village of Hoffman Estates in 2000 was home to more than 800 businesses; such familiar corporate warlords as Sears, Roebuck and Co., SBC, Siemens Medical Systems, Transamerica were among the many firms employing 500 people or more—in case of sears many more—people. Harvard, 75 miles from the Loop in northwest McHenry County, was a farm town of less than 6,600 in 1996 when the electronics giant Motorola—repeating the move it had made from its original facility in Chicago to Schaumburg a half-century earlier—opened a cell phone factory there. (Here a soft heart might have played as big a part in the decision as hard economics; Harvard had been the birthplace of Paul Galvin, the founder of Motorola’s predecessor firm in Chicago in 1928.) The 1.3 million-square-foot assembly plant at its peak employed as many as 5,000 people. Alas, Motorola’s cell phone business tanked, and the company closed the plant in 2003.

 

Here again, only the address is new. Each of these industrial outposts is but a newer version of Skokie—once was home to more than 400 businesses, including such national giants as Rand McNally, Bell & Howell, and Searle—which was itself a newer version of Chicago.

 

Farm Towns

 

Chicago is not usually the first place Illinoisans think of Chicago when they think of farming. But Ann Durkin Keating states that at least 96 incorporated suburbs and Chicago neighborhoods have agricultural roots, which was much the most common kind of settlement in the evolving Chicagoland. For example, farming (including businesses supporting farming) remained the principal local occupation of Schaumburg for decades. A local market sprung out at what is now the intersection of Schaumburg and Roselle Roads. But while the soil was good the location was not, being near neither a river nor a rail line, and so Schaumburg remained high and dry as the tides of development rose around it.