Lake Forest, IL

Lake Forest was designed as a college town and railroad suburb before it became a city. Presbyterian organizers chose the site in the 1850s, and surveyor Almerin Hotchkiss laid out a curving plan around Lake Forest College, University Park, the depot, and Forest Park on the Lake Michigan bluff. The original street network deliberately discouraged through traffic, a pattern still apparent in winding roads and limited east-west connections. This planned landscape arose on Potawatomi homelands after the federal government forced the Potawatomi west in 1836. The city incorporated in 1861, linking the college, wooded residential streets, and rail access to Chicago within one municipality. Those origins remain visible in the institutional grounds, preserved architecture, and landscape design of the eastern side.

ATTRBrycesteiner / CC BY-SA 4.0

For daily orientation, east and west Lake Forest function differently. The Union Pacific North line stops on Western Avenue beside the central business district, with Market Square, City Hall, the library, restaurants, and services nearby. A second Metra station on the Milwaukee District North line serves the Waukegan Road and Settlers' Square district several miles west. Farther west, Interstate 94 and Illinois Route 60 meet beside Conway Park, a corporate office district with a concentration of pharmaceutical and packaging businesses; the Chicago Bears' Halas Hall headquarters and training campus lies just north. The three centers are separated by residential and institutional areas. An address near the lake, Waukegan Road, or the tollway therefore connects to a different rail line, shopping area, and cluster of workplaces.

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Market Square gives the eastern center an unusual architectural coherence. Developed beginning in 1915 and designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw, it is widely recognized as the country's first planned shopping center. Low buildings, courtyards, arcades, and a central greensward place shops and public space together a block from the train. Nearby, the Gorton Center occupies a former school and houses a theater, arts programs, community events, and the Lake Forest campus of the Music Institute of Chicago. Lake Forest College adds lectures, performances, athletics, and historic campus grounds south of downtown. These institutions keep cultural and educational activity close to the original 1857 plan, while the western business district serves more routine retail and service needs.

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Lake Michigan forms the city's eastern edge, and public access is concentrated at specific places. Forest Park Beach lies below the bluff and about three-quarters of a mile from the central business district and its Metra station. The beach is public, but parking rules distinguish residents from visitors: city stickers are required in designated resident lots, while nonresidents use daily-fee parking and may need to walk from town when on-site space is unavailable. Inland, Lake Forest Open Lands manages ten preserves with more than 20 miles of public trails across prairie, savanna, woodland, wetland, ravine, and lakeshore habitat. Together, the bluff, ravines, two rail corridors, and tollway-era office district give the eastern, central, and western parts of Lake Forest sharply different settings.