Lake Forest’s Unique Planning History

As the City of Lake Forest embarks on plans to improve its Central Business District, or downtown, the town’s remarkable heritage of planning for development provides a valuable historic context.

Hotchkiss Railroad Garden Suburban Plan, 1856–57

Starting in the 1850s Lake Forest has been a leader in town planning, beginning with its 1857 plan for 1,200 acres east of the tracks and across ten ravines. The town founders hired Almerin Hotchkiss, a St. Louis landscape gardener and cemetery designer, October–March 1856–57, to create the largest to that date trans-Atlantic type railroad garden commuter suburb.

The 1856-organized Lake Forest Association, Chicago, had bought up approximately 2,000 acres of what today is east Lake Forest. About 1,200 acres were east of the 1855 completed railroad track between Chicago and Waukegan. Hotchkiss was intrigued by the irregular terrain east of tracks and focused his work there, also creating a somewhat perfunctory grid layout west of the tracks, a support area for the 285 estate scaled lots east of the tracks.

Hotchkiss began his plan by selecting the longest bluff top site between ravines for his Forest Park, with its deer path down to the shoreline at the north end. The deer path became his organizing street, wandering along the ravine up to the 1855 completed train tracks, where he placed the station.

The support area west of the tracks was set up with a few streets parallel to the tracks: Western Ave., the west side border of the garden suburb, for businesses facing the station, with an alley behind, now Bank Lane; Forest Ave., Oakwood Ave., and Green Bay Rd. Three streets from the curvilinear plan east continued as straight ones west of the tracks.

Campuses and Onwentsia, 1880s–90s

By the 1880s and 1890s, Lake Forest University plans refined three campuses by Cobb & Frost (Ferry Hall), O.C. Simonds (Lake Forest Academy), and the Collegiate campus, thirty acres (Simonds and Warren H. Manning). F.L. Olmsted, planner of NYC’s Central Park, ca. 1858–60, laid out the H. I. Cobb farm, Rockwood, 1890–93, by 1895 becoming the Onwentsia Club. The clubhouse was the first local residence of planner Edward H. Bennett, 1907.

Market Square, 1912–16

The Chicago architect and critic Peter B. Wight, writing in Western Architect, October 1917, reported that Market Square at Lake Forest was the first commercially developed and implemented artful town plan. The character was Beaux Arts, an adaptation of European town markets, drawing in traditional, classic, and modernist styles, blended harmoniously. The final design was the work of Howard Van Doren Shaw, 1915. The third, final rendering of his plan introduced the long park west of Bank Lane, with the stores north and south visible from the west side train station, when Chicagoans arrived.

Shaw’s Atteridge Farm Estates and West Park Neighborhood, 1906-16

But this was not architect Shaw’s first planning rodeo. Already in town he had platted two estate enclaves. The first came in 1897, one for his family at Ragdale and two for clients to the immediate north. The second was a bigger, two-part plan on the 1830s Cole/Swanton/Atteridge farm. On the west side of Green Bay Rd., he developed six estates between Westminster and Laurel Ave. Shaw also laid out in 1906 the neighborhood of middle-class houses east of Green Bay Rd., with West Park set aside between these as a buffer for the expensive estates. The park, though, offered a great amenity for the homeowners in the east side’s builder houses. Today all of this Atteridge farm plan, like Market Square, is on the National Register.

Bennett and Lake Forest Zoning and Plan Commission, 1920s

Market Square was completed just prior to the U.S. joining World War I, though built with profits from the conflict dating from August of 1914. The war ended abruptly in late 1918, slicing into the economic boom, as did both the 1918–20 influenza epidemic and the 1920 Red Scare. The economy only revived by 1925. Local resident and co-author with Burnham of the 1909 Plan of Chicago Edward H. Bennett’s planning firm segued from major central downtown plans to, by 1923, zoning plans for Chicago and Lake Forest, and by 1929 to a Plan Commission for Lake Forest to oversee development. This tilted the initiative from central planners to property owners and developers, with a zoning context. This worked into the 1950s with little Depression-era and later development and with Bennett present in town.

New City Boards and Commissions, 1960s–1990s

By the 1960s as development volume increased after Depression era income tax levels began to recede, the City launched a Building Review Board by residents to guide and manage new petitions. This initiative sought to continue the Beaux Arts harmony that from the 1890s to 1940–42 had become the prevailing or defining local architectural character, even as some modernist houses were built, as well.

By 1976, when the Preservation Foundation was organized, the U.S. bicentennial had awakened interest in historic preservation of older buildings and neighborhoods. After creating two 1970s National Register historic districts and one for Green Bay Rd. estates in the 1990s, the City passed an historic preservation ordinance grandfathering in those three districts for east Lake Forest estates, Green Bay Rd. estates, and south of Illinois an Oakwood and Vine district for a small support neighborhood. Since 1998, changes to historic properties—additions, new construction, and demolitions—are overseen by the Historic Preservation Commission with its decisions reviewable by the City Council.

Public-private non-profit organization partnerships

In the 1970s and 1980s and again in 2009-18 the Preservation Foundation collaborated with the City to save and restore the 1900 Frost & Granger train station. The 2009 planning work was guided by noted preservation architect Gunny Harboe.

Several landscapes for parks and public buildings in town have had major plans since the 1970s and 1980s, which introduced in part leadership by the Lake Forest Garden Club.

These include:

- a series of in effect distributed community centers: Gorton (1972), Ragdale Foundation (1986), Grove Campus (ca. 2000), and Elawa Farm Foundation (ca. 2000).

- the 1978 Lake Forest Library additions, with landscape by Franz Lipp.

- the mid 1980s Forest Park Beach, with a City bond issue for $9 million, design by Steve Christy.

- the 1998–2000 Market Square 2000 project, the landscape and hardscape renewed, design by Rodney Robinson, Delaware.

- the 1998 City Hall garden, design by Doug Hoerr, Chicago.

- the 2009–15 Forest Park bluff top landscape, with design by Stimson Associates, Massachusetts, with Craig Bergmann and Cliff Miller.

What this list shows is that successful civic plans build on public-private organization partnerships for assessment, planning, and shared funding. Private funding can be less successful when it shifts the balance of decision-making to the individual private owner-developer. This is shown in the recent McKinley/ Westminster Phase Three, for example, a long monotonous, industrial-character building’s east façade. This has been built less than a block from AIA Gold Medalist Howard Van Doren Shaw’s Market Square demonstration, a century earlier, of how to design a long building with scale-reducing traditional character.

Getting the best possible planning and architectural input for new initiatives would be consistent with the Lake Forest Association’s hiring of St. Louis-based Almerin Hotchkiss in 1856–57, working with estate owner investors to develop Market Square with Shaw in 1912–16; and hiring Edward H. Bennett, the nation’s leading planner in the 1920s.

The Depression and WWII broke that way of doing things, with little changed. But since the late 1970s and 1980s, private non-profit organizations’ leadership has played a major role in planning for shared resources, such as the central business district.

The best nationally recognized planning is part of Lake Forest’s DNA almost 160 years after Chicago’s Lake Forest Association first hired leading Midwestern landscape designer Almerin Hotchkiss to lay out this town east of Green Bay Road. Maintaining this very high standard is the challenge for this generation.