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player ready...It’s my most vivid recollection of visiting Park Forest as a kid in the 1970s to see my cousins: Dolton, where I grew up, was 12 miles to the north. Its streets, like those in virtually all inner-ring suburbs at the time, were extensions of Chicago’s easy-to-use grid, meaning you didn’t need more than an address to easily find a friend’s house across town.
Not Park Forest. Like a giant maze, streets could twist and turn for what felt like miles. I was deathly afraid of losing sight of my cousin, John Mondlock, as we rode our bikes past house after house to the famous (now dead) Park Forest Plaza; or to the Aquacenter; or to any of a number of baseball fields that I couldn’t find now if you gave me a map.
But other than the physical structures, including two-story co-ops and the winding streets, little of the 1950s Park Forest described by William H. Whyte in his epic “The Organization Man,” is recognizable 60 years after Park Forest emerged as a largely privately owned, self-contained new suburb.
Officially born in 1948, it was in many ways the very definition of the British New Towns of the late 19th Century, planned communities that mixed the best of urban life with country living.
Park Forest was full of kids who came and went through my cousin’s house at will, as if they lived there. Neighbors acted like family and were as open to me as they were to their own kids.
Park Forest’s place in the history of suburban planning is firmly established, and its influence can be seen in many other places. The winding streets, for example, variations of designs by architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, are found in some form in virtually every growing suburb in the nation.
Park Forest also had grand open spaces–we called them prairies–that would suddenly appear in the middle of a row of houses. Later I would find out they were actually drainage areas on the low, marshy land that Park Forest was built on. They were too expensive to be drained and developed, so they became great places of exploration.
Now many of the open spaces have dried up, the result of the suburban sprawl that eventually swallowed up Park Forest and the suburbs beyond.
But there are parts of the early Park Forest that survive. An active community enhanced by young, energetic townsfolk still thrives, helping create a vibrant arts community. Racial integration, a contentious issue in Park Forest in its earliest days, is now studied as a model by other municipalities.
But affluence and two-income, two-car families–the very things that changed much of life for most of America since the 1970s–veered the suburb away from the communal activities Whyte observed in the early 1950s.
“Find out where the flow of wheeled juvenile traffic is and you will find the outlines of the wives’ Kaffeeklatsch routes,” Whyte wrote. The social networks of neighbors built largely around mothers following their kids changed dramatically over the years as moms went back to work and men–and increasingly, women–in their organizations moved up and out.
Over the years, a populace made up mainly of young corporate managers was replaced by a mix of blue-collar and professional workers and, with the emergence of Governors State University to the south, academics.
In many ways, Park Forest has gone the way of other planned communities. Much of what was fostered by its design–a sense of community where co-op back doors opened up to communal back yards, for example–has been virtually lost. In fact, it’s hard to find any comparable, tight-knit community today, as developers competing to make a buck largely determine the suburban landscape and affluent families seek bigger houses, more land and more isolation.
For example, urban planners note that big houses with automatic garage-door openers that allow neighbors to slip in and out unnoticed are the norm.
“Everyone is running to their McMansions and hiding,” says Kristin Szylvian, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University, who has studied planned communities. “Affluence has changed America. In the end we’ve created these suburban prisons.”
From the start, Park Forest was different from its predecessor Greenbelt communities developed as part of the New Deal in the 1930s. Instead of a federally managed town that would later be sold off, it started as a private venture that was quickly turned over to a municipal government run by residents.
Like the famous Levittowns along the East Coast, Park Forest was developed with the idea that there was to be a dwelling for different stages of life: apartments or co-ops for GIs returning from World War II and young families starting out, and larger, detached homes as families and incomes grew. A novel shopping plaza in the middle of town and civic structures, parks and schools were meticulously planned out.
But it was the commercial drive and mass-production of homes that really set Park Forest apart from the federal New Deal towns established to help jumpstart local economies during the Depression.
If not for the combination of Chicagoans Carroll F. Street, Nathan Manilow and Philip Klutznick, a former federal housing administration official under President Harry Truman, Park Forest might not have been a successful enterprise. The three started American Community Builders, which got the community off and running.
Klutznick was not a developer, according to Gregory Randall, a landscape architect and Park Forest native who wrote “America’s Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois.” “But he knew how to get things done,” he says. “I think Manilow brought him on because he knew how to get stuff. What he got in Klutznick was a well-organized military man.”
Following World War II, supplies were hard to come by, with most building materials still controlled by the government, and finding places to live for the thousands of returning GIs was beginning to be a problem.
Klutznick’s connections in the government, many say, helped Park Forest get a head start. Almost overnight there was a plan for 3,000 two-story, two- and three-bedroom apartments and co-operatives. In November 1947 they sold co-ops to 160 people.
The demand was so huge, Randall said, that American Community Builders was closing on 30 to 40 houses a week. In just a few years, 5,000 housing units in the town went up. It was the swiftness of the building that made Park Forest different from any other suburb in the nation and that would forever change residential building in the U.S.
The housing was mass-produced, with teams of workers moving from one structure to another, block after block, much like an assembly line. “They were built horizontally, almost like how you would build a car,” Randall says.
The co-ops were built first and ranged from 750 to 1,100 square feet. Later, the detached houses went up. Most were built with no garages or basements.
But it wasn’t just the innovative building plan that put Park Forest on the map; it was the sense of community that made it a noteworthy social experiment and the focal point of Whyte’s book.
The developers’ decision to turn the town over to its residents soon after incorporating was a major departure from the practice of other builders, as ACB’s clients would now become its masters early on in the building process.
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Social networking was encouraged by placing the co-ops so that they opened up on large parking bays, which became the unofficial meeting and partying spots for neighbors. “It acted like a giant frat party,” Randall says. Whyte also noted that the parking bays were a natural meeting place for moms watching their kids play.
One of the most dynamic features that distinguished Park Forest from other Chicago suburbs was the town’s political structure. To this day, individuals running for village trustee or president are nonpartisan. “People could vote for individuals rather than a party,” says Therese Goodrich, who moved into Park Forest in 1954 with her husband, John, and served as a trustee from 1980-82. Her husband also served as a trustee in the late 1970s.
As a result, individuals could run a thrifty campaign and not be beholden to a party. Issues like integration–Park Forest was one of the first suburbs to successfully integrate its schools–were addressed head on, helping to prevent white flight and contentious board meetings that fractured other suburbs.
“There was a young population that was setting the rules and governing the town,” Goodrich says. “I think some of the people from the more conservative suburbs started looking at us strangely and asking, ‘What’s going on there?'” Indeed, there was a manic energy to the town, whether it was in organizing neighborhood activities or in its early government structure. Much of it came from the youthfulness of its residents–most in their 20s–and their military backgrounds.
“There was a tremendous amount of energy in every conceivable direction,” Randall says. “Keep in mind: Three-quarters of the families were ex-GIs. The military makes you organized, so this was a very easy transition for most.”
But the town suffered, some say, by not being aggressive enough early on. Pinned in on the north by the established Chicago Heights and Cook County Forest preserves on its east, Park Forest’s real hopes for growth rested on early plans to annex south.
But town leaders voted not to follow those original blueprints and the eventual result was that, as incomes grew in the years after the war, families seeking bigger homes and more space were forced to look elsewhere. Some moved to established upscale suburbs like Flossmoor and Olympia Fields. Many more moved further away to places like Hinsdale.
More land might have spurred another round of innovative planning to help keep those upwardly mobile workers from leaving and thus keep home prices–the key economic engine of thriving suburbs–from stagnating.
Park Forest moved slowly at times to address other issues. The failure of the town’s outdoor mall to adapt to competition from new indoor malls popping up nearby led to the central shopping plaza’s demise.
Recently, though, the town has become more aggressive on the development front, with plans to build nearly 100 moderately priced homes and other living units on land the plaza once occupied
Even the famous small co-ops are changing. Most of them have been updated with new windows and other amenities. Some families are buying side-by-side units and removing the shared walls to create more space.
When Whyte’s book first came out, the town was abuzz. Some residents didn’t like being the subject of a large scientific study, but many agreed with his observations.
“I remember reading ‘The Organization Man’ at the time and thinking this was interesting,” says Goodrich, who with her husband raised nine children in Park Forest and still lives there. “And then you started living that life. You . . . started thinking, ‘We really lived that way.’ You may not want to be the subject of the research and have someone say this is how you think, but as a matter of fact, there were a lot of people who fit that mold.”
She remains bullish about Park Forest and is encouraged by the new housing developments. “It just needs people who have good jobs and can afford to buy them,” she says.
Sounds like something Street, Manilow and Klutznick might have said as the vision for Park Forest began to take shape.
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