Benjamin Andrew and Erna Schmidt of Arlington Heights had nothing in common except for one crisp autumn day.
On a late October evening, Benjamin entered the world in a hospital delivery room not far from where Erna, lying in a nursing home, was making her exit. But the Arlington Heights known to John and Jan Andrew’s newborn son will be vastly different from that which the 91-year-old Schmidt called home.
Change has come quickly to Chicago’s northwest suburbs. From once-isolated communities surrounded by farmland, the area has grown rapidly into a bustling employment center that is expected to continue attracting new residents well into the next century.
In the nine townships encompassing the northwest suburbs, the population had ballooned to more than 820,000 by 1994– almost seven times greater than the 1950 census figure. And between 1985 and 1995, the number of jobs in the area increased by more than 50 percent. Today, one in five people employed in Cook County works in the northwest suburbs.
But with the boom has come an assortment of growing pains ranging from urban blight to congested roads. Residents from Elk Grove Village to Elgin now confront daily many of the same problems of the big city to the southeast.
When George K. Busse, 42, of Mt. Prospect moved back to the area in the mid-1980s after more than 12 years away at college and in the Navy, he found the landscape of his youth dramatically transformed.
“In some ways it was a disappointment,” said Busse, a Chicago stockbroker whose family helped settle the area 150 years ago. “But I’m realistic enough to realize that nothing stays the same.”
The story of the northwest suburbs is written in the numbers of a population explosion over several decades. But it is perhaps best illustrated with a snapshot of a single day:
– Busse hurtling toward home aboard a Metra train along with a dwindling number of employees who continue commuting to work in Chicago.
– Woody Goebbert, 61, of Arlington Heights, prowling the dirt-and-gravel lot of his sprawling fruit market on Rand Road– the 4 1/2-acre spread representing all that remains of what once was his 40-acre farm.
– Relatives pausing to remember Erna Schmidt as the house that she moved into in 1948 stood vacant with a “For Sale” sign in the yard.
– And Jan Andrew checking into Northwest Community Hospital, where she would give birth three hours later to her 8-pound, 15-ounce son.
In many ways, the Andrew family, three generations strong, represents the past, present and future of the northwest suburbs. Benjamin’s grandfather James, a civil engineer who works as a sales representative for a lubricants manufacturer, has seen the area change dramatically since he moved here from northwest Ohio in 1960 and took a job with Pure Oil Co.
In 1962, James and his wife, Ann, bought a house in shady Arlington Heights, then a town of about 28,000.
Now it has a population of more than 77,000 and is expected to grow to about 80,000 by the year 2010, according to projections by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
The boom has changed the face of the northwest in profound ways. The population hasn’t just grown; it has aged and become more diverse.
“When I first came into Arlington Heights, there was an unwritten rule that only Caucasians and middle-class people were welcome,” James Andrew said. “Today, I think everybody is welcome, and that’s good.”
“When I went to school, we did not see the different ethnic backgrounds,” said Sue Morris of Rockford, who grew up in Arlington Heights. “Now it seems to be highly populated with the different ethnic origins. That’s very foreign to the way Arlington Heights used to be.”
James Andrew’s son John, a human resources manager for a computer construction company, does not commute to work in Chicago as James did when he was young. James no longer commutes, either. He works out of his car and home in Arlington Heights. John works in Buffalo Grove.
John, 34, and his wife, Jan, 35, live two miles from John’s parents on a once-sleepy street that has become a throughway for speeding cars. The Andrews don’t feel good about teaching 2 1/2-year-old son David to ride his tricycle. Congestion on main roads has caused problems on secondary streets, which now are used by motorists trying to avoid traffic jams.
Cars are everywhere. There are few options for public transportation between suburbs. Many businesses are having trouble filling entry-level workers for jobs because prospective employees have no mode of transportation or, as in the case of many local police officers and firefighters, simply cannot afford housing in the northwest suburbs.
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“What we see is that there isn’t a lot of trouble in finding people for the high-paying jobs,” said Kris Howard, chairwoman of Northwest 2001, a regional planning group. “There are retail openings up and down Woodfield Mall all the time, help-wanted signs in fast-food places. I think where it’s difficult sometimes to get people is in entry-level jobs and office work.”
A proposal to extend the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line past O’Hare International Airport to Woodfield has picked up steam in recent months.
Other projects in the early stages of planning include a commuter train line that would ring the suburbs on the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern freight tracks, providing transportation from suburb to suburb.
“We need to look at more creative ways to get people from home to work,” Howard said. “Not just from the city to the suburbs, but within the suburbs because there are so many jobs out there now.”
The northwest suburban job boom of the past decade is expected to continue as more businesses open or move to the area. The appeal stems from the area’s closeness to O’Hare, an educated employment pool, abundant housing and respected school systems.
But all those workers have brought with them a big-city brand of gridlock. When Busse returned, he discovered that the area had lost its small-town feel.
The Busses’ family patriarch, former Cook County Commissioner William Busse, was instrumental in settling Mt. Prospect. It has been almost 150 years since the old man bought an English tavern owner’s 160-acre farm for just $2,700–including tools, livestock and, according to the contract, “one yellow dog.”
Now Mt. Prospect is a town of more than 53,600 residents and precious little open space of any kind.
“When I was a kid, you could go out a mile or so from home and go hunting for rabbit or pheasant,” Busse said. “Now if you do that, you’d shoot somebody.”
Woody Goebbert, a friendly man with salt-and-pepper hair whose family has been around for generations, misses farming.
“Very much. Just about every aspect of it,” he said.
He still wears a cap and a plaid flannel shirt. But he quit farming 14 years ago when it became impossible to run his lumbering machinery up and down Rand Road, the increasingly busy thoroughfare that now thunders past the front of his property.
“Can you see a tractor going up and down that road?” he said as traffic flew past the front of his market. “It wasn’t too safe.”
His was the last farm in Arlington Heights. When it was sold and subdivided, an era passed.
As Thanksgiving approaches, Palatine resident Lorraine Schwantz Heine recalls when preparing the holiday meal meant a trip to another area farm: Chidley’s Turkey Farm. But that was a long time ago. Now Palatine’s downtown, an enclave of shops and restaurants embraced by graceful Victorian homes, barely resembles the hometown Heine grew up in from the Great Depression into the 1950s.
“Today, there are too many people,” Heine said. “The people years ago used to be friendlier. Now, everyone is working, and you don’t have the great relationships with neighbors like you used to.”
Arlene Mulder, mayor of Arlington Heights, echoes sentiments of her colleagues in neighboring suburbs when she said her village has run out of land and must work with what it has.
“We are landlocked,” Mulder said. “We are pretty much built out.”
So the village must make tough decisions about how to maintain services without huge influxes of tax revenue. Residents of Arlington Heights and other northwest suburbs expect a certain quality of life; they came here to find it.
“I know what the taxes are,” John Andrew said. “I make a choice to live here.”
Within walking distance of John Andrew’s prim house are three parks, and the young family is just a five-minute drive from at least four swimming pools. But basic services also must be maintained, and myriad public-works projects loom.
Some of the older suburbs must start replacing and updating outdated systems for water, sewers and roads. Some have seen fit to begin redeveloping their crumbling and sometimes vacant downtowns, a measure designed to attract new businesses.
As part of such plans, many communities are building high- or low-rise condominiums in their downtowns so more people might live and shop in the heart of the business district.
“The pendulum is swinging in another direction,” said Laurie Stone, president of the Coalition of Chambers of Suburban Cook County. “People are staying close to home. They want convenience and a feeling of being connected. A lot of that goes with shopping in the downtown of the municipality they reside in.”
With all the changes and more to come, will children such as Benjamin Andrew and his brother, David, grow up and move here to raise a family, as their father and grandfather did? John Andrew thinks Arlington Heights will continue to hold its appeal–probably.
“I think in the short term it will,” he said.
But it won’t be an easy choice, said his father.
“There are going to be a lot more pressures on his sons than on mine,” James Andrew said. “Drugs weren’t a problem in school then. There were no gangs, no concern about gangs. Today there seems to be a major concern.”
George K. Busse said he thinks the area will lose its draw slowly.
“I think each generation will be a little less and a little less” likely to settle in the area, he said.
Now that many northwest suburbs are reaching middle age, they have to start grappling with aging housing stocks. The region must work to fight residents’ urges to keep moving north and west to McHenry and Kane Counties, where the land is fresh and new–and less expensive.
Once an affordable place for young couples to start a family, the northwest region is quickly becoming too expensive for those same kinds of families, recent college graduates and the elderly.
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Many suburbs lack open land to use for building affordable housing for the elderly, and waiting lists of seven or eights years are not uncommon. The problem is expected to only worsen as the Baby Boom goes gray. Much of that aging is occurring in the suburbs; Arlington Heights, for example, has seen its elderly population grow by about 70 percent in the last 20 years, from 7,636 to 12,996.
The windows of Erna Schmidt’s two-story Georgian home on North Ridge Avenue in Arlington Heights are dark now. Her house, one of the first on the block in 1948, has sat empty since she moved to a Prospect Heights nursing home almost two years ago. On Oct. 20, as baby Benjamin Andrew was being born, Erna Schmidt died.
The past and future are strangers.
“I go back now, and I think, `Oh, my heavens,’ ” said Schmidt’s daughter Sue Morris, who grew up in the house on Ridge Avenue. “This is not what it was when I left. There are people all over.”‘