Lake Forest: The First Planned Suburb

Thirty miles north of Chicago, where the bluffs drop toward Lake Michigan, lies a city that was drawn on paper before it had a single house.

In eighteen fifty-six, a group of Presbyterian investors hired a landscape designer named Almerin Hotchkiss to plan a town from scratch. They were motivated partly by theology and partly by real estate. Northwestern University in Evanston was Methodist. These investors wanted a Presbyterian institution, and they would build a college and a town around it simultaneously.

Hotchkiss's plan, submitted in eighteen fifty-seven, was something new in American urban design. Rather than a standard grid of rectangular blocks, he laid out curving streets that followed the natural topography of the lakeshore bluffs. He designated corridors of parkland woven through the residential areas, a town center adjacent to the commuter rail station, and reserved the most dramatic terrain, the wooded ravines and the lakeshore itself, for large estate-scale lots. The grid he hated appeared only west of the railroad tracks, where the working neighborhoods and commercial support areas were sensibly organized. East of the tracks, everything curved.

The plan drew directly on the English picturesque tradition and on the design principles being developed for rural cemeteries and urban parks in the mid-nineteenth century. It preceded Frederick Law Olmsted's famous Riverside plan, laid out ten years later, and is considered one of the earliest large-scale planned picturesque suburbs in the United States, coming only four years after Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, the first of its kind in America.

Lake Forest Academy opened in eighteen fifty-eight, and college classes began in eighteen sixty. The city incorporated in eighteen sixty-one. The curvilinear street pattern Hotchkiss designed survives almost entirely intact today.

The estates built here over the following decades by Chicago industrialists and financiers made Lake Forest one of the wealthiest communities in the country. The design made possible the landscape: the houses disappear into the trees, the streets bend without warning, and the lake remains hidden until you are almost upon it.