Evanston celebrates 150-year anniversary

As Evanston turns 150 years old Sunday, the city reflects on a rich history as the one-time flagship for the temperance movement, the seat of a world-class university, the site of racial strife and the center of countless town-vs.-gown conflicts.

Incorporated Dec. 29, 1863, and named after Northwestern University founder John Evans, Evanston was established as something of a refuge from the urban problems to its south, yet today confronts many of the same woes.

Over Evanston’s 15 decades, thousands of noteworthy people — from Daniel Burnham to Marlon Brando — have called it home. It has an arts scene, an actively involved community and a shopping district that many towns of its size would envy.

Yet, for all that, Evanston, in the eyes of many residents, somehow still retains a bit of small-town, homespun flavor.

“It is the perfect mix of city and suburb with a large dose of Mayberry,” said lifelong resident Chris Livatino, 40.

Evanston residents value their lakefront community for its diversity, downtown shops, restaurants, theater and accessibility to downtown Chicago.

The Ridge

Long before Evanston existed, the area was inhabited by Potawatomi Indians. Later, early French voyageurs used the name Grosse Point to refer to the jutting land now marked by the Grosse Point Lighthouse.

Later, parts of the area were known as Ridgeville, a township founded in 1850 and named for an old Native America trail known as the Ridge that ran along the North Shore.

Ridgeville then consisted of 12 cabins, with a log schoolhouse and teacher who was paid $2 a month, plus board. Travelers passing through also found a rest stop, “Buck-eye Hotel,” which served as a diner, post office and tavern, according to a 1936 Chicago Daily Tribune article.

Today, a park district in southern Evanston retains the name Ridgeville.

First came NU

What became modern-day Evanston began to take shape in earnest in the 1850s, when a group of Methodists, seeking to create an institution for “sanctified learning,” purchased 379 acres along the lake north of Chicago for $25,000.

To help finance the development of Northwestern University, the founders began selling off the land in pieces. The university donated land for churches and a water treatment facility as Evanston grew up around it.

“Most of downtown Evanston and a fair amount of residential property … all of that land was at one time owned by Northwestern,” said Alan Cubbage, university spokesman.

The Northwestern founders were opposed to slavery and alcohol, and were seeking a safe enclave outside Chicago and away from corruption, historians note.

“Chicago was a little rough and tumble for the Methodists,” said Lori Osborne of the Evanston History Center. “The Methodists who were founding the university thought maybe people would not want to send their children to Chicago, but maybe if they moved north they could create a campus and establish moral flavor.”

At one time, in fact, Evanston was nicknamed “Heavenston,” inspired by the town’s strong base of faith and temperance, Cubbage said.

In order to preserve its “moral climate” a four-mile radius was established around the university preventing the sale, distribution and production of alcohol. The town would remain dry until the 1970s.

A long marriage

Though the history of Evanston is inextricably linked to the university that calls it home, the relationship hasn’t always been harmonious.

The university’s property tax exemption, granted in its charter, has long been a source of contention between city and school officials.

In 1874, Evanston sued Northwestern demanding it pay property taxes. The suit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the university’s favor.

Evanston at one point also attempted — unsuccessfully — to levy a 5-percent tax on student tuition as a means of generating revenue.

Cubbage said the university strives to be more responsive to the city’s concerns. In recent years, the university has purchased a fire engine and an ambulance for Evanston. Yet even as recently as this year, some residents cried foul over the university’s construction of a visitors center at the edge of a local beach.

“It’s very much like a … couple married for a long, long time and there are certain things you do that irritate your spouse … at the same time there is a lot of affection there,” Cubbage said.

Diversity, division

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Some of Evanston’s earliest settlers in the 1850s were African-American, and many more moved to the area for manufacturing in the early 1900s.

As the century progressed, so did segregation in housing and schools. Whites settled the east side along the lake; blacks were largely relegated to less grand areas on the west side — a pattern still reflected, though to a lesser extent, in today’s Evanston.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s and ’60s, people in Evanston also “start to agitate for fair housing and school desegregation,” said Osborne, of the local history center. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave several speeches in Evanston during those years. Like many communities at this time, Evanston did not have a “comprehensive or effective” law prohibiting or punishing discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, according to the Evanston History Center.

“The community changes in the 1960s and takes on these hard issues,” said Osborne of the history center. “We still grapple with (how) that segregation had impacted Evanston.”

Bennett Johnson, 84, has seen both sides of Evanston.

When Johnson was a child, his father was a chauffeur and gardener for a wealthy white man who lived in a 30-room lakefront mansion. Johnson’s family lived in a coach house on the property.

While Johnson enjoyed the access to the mansion’s private beach, he also recalled that he and his sisters were not allowed at the white school three blocks away. They had to walk a mile to an all-black school, and Johnson recalled that they would get teased by white kids as they walked past.

Today, Johnson said, housing equality is “certainly not anywhere where it should be, but (is) certainly not as rigid as it was.”

Retail revival

Over the years, Johnson has watched the high-rises come in, and he’s seen Evanston’s fortunes as a shopping destination ebb and flow.

“When I was a kid growing up, Evanston was the shopping center for the North Shore,” he said. “Then Old Orchard (shopping center in Skokie) came, and that diminished the importance of Evanston as a shopping center. Now … shoppers are coming back.”

Following a period of relative dormancy, city officials began focusing on redevelopment, and Evanston’s downtown is now revitalized and vibrant.

“Unlike most suburban communities we are very heterogeneous and not homogeneous,” said Marybeth Schroeder, vice president for programs at the Evanston Community Foundation. “That’s what people really treasure, besides the fact that we are on the lake.”

Marrazzo is a freelance reporter; Black is a staff reporter.

Evanston’s yearlong 150th birthday celebration culminates with the city’s First Night Evanston event Tuesday. Go to firstnightevanston.org for a schedule and ticket information.