What old money neighborhoods stayed intact?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Cook County North Shore (Evanston and New Trier) are roughly equivalent to Southern Westchester. But Lake County is much newer.

Westchester, by 1930, had more than half of its current population. Lake County reached that stage by 1970.

Lake to Westchester isn't a great comparison. Westchester directly abuts NYC and contains all of the city's northern inner ring suburbia.

Lake county, on the other hand, doesn't even start until you're 10 miles north of Howard street (roughly the distance from the city limits edge of the Bronx up to white plains), putting the VAST bulk of Chicago's northern inner ring suburbia in cook county, so it's not surprising at all that lake county took a lot longer to fill up with people.

Originally Posted by Crawford

Railroad suburbs had very old neighborhoods in walking distance to the train station. But further out it was still country. Wilmette near the train station is very old, but West Wilmette is fully postwar and built around the auto. West Wilmette was probably farmland/woods with rural services until the postwar decades. Households had one car and women didn't drive so you generally had to be walking distance to train and shops/amenities.

Well yeah, up until the '50s west Wilmette was still all farmland tilled by the original 19th century German settlers to the area (the name "New Trier" certainly didn't originate from the waspy elites who came to dominate the northshore in the early 20th), but as I mentioned before, east Wilmette and the other lakefront northshore burbs along the commuter rail line were not "the country" anymore in the 1920s. They were exploding with development in one of the first deep suburban penetrations out from the city into the hinterland, swelling to a total population of 120K by the close of the decade (that figure is not small potatoes for pre-war suburbia in the US).

Because chicago's first wave of suburbanization occurred before the automobile completely took over everything, it happened in thin corridors along the commuter rail lines, not in the more familiar concentric ring pattern seen in the post-war era.



Funny aside, believe it or not, there was actually one small family-owned farm in west Wilmette that held on all the way into the 1980s. One of my childhood friend's house backed up to it, and we used to hop the fence and play in the field as kids until it all got sold to a developer in like 1985 who of course turned it into cul-de-sacs and houses.