^ I always kinda "forget" what a relative beast NW Indiana was pre-war.
In 1940, Lake County, IN already had 293,195 people, making it by far the largest collar county of Cook. The other main collar counties (Dupage, Lake (IL), Will, and Kane) we're all between 100K -130K in 1940 (Mchenry was still HARDCORE corn country in 1940 and certainly wasn't a "collar county" at the time).
But what's even more remarkable is that 246,847 of Lake County, IN's people were located in just Gary, Hammond, East Chicago & Whiting in the top 5th of the county. The southern 80% of the county was still all cornfields sprinkled with a few small towns.
Those GIANT steel mills and their myriad associated industrial plants were the realest fucking deal back in the day when most men actually had to go out and "work" work, not just slowly melt their eyeballs staring into a computer screen for 8+ hours a day as they desk-jockey the decades away.
It's also interesting that the CB included Waukegan in the metro area back then, but not the other significant satellite ring cities of Elgin, Aurora, and Joliet, all of whom were a similar distance from the loop and had solid commuter rail connections to the city by then, just as Waukegan.
I wish the CB still used finer-grained townships to define metro areas instead of their extremely clumsy county-based definitions.
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"Missing middle" housing can be a great middle ground for many middle class families.
Last edited by Steely Dan; Nov 24, 2022 at 1:10 AM.
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