Park Forest: Potawatomi Prairie to Postwar Suburb

This land at the southern edge of metropolitan Chicago was Potawatomi territory for generations. The Potawatomi called this prairie corridor home until the Treaty of Chicago in eighteen thirty-three forced their removal west, one of many cessions that cleared the Illinois landscape for Euro-American farming. The ground became farmland.

After World War Two, millions of veterans came home to a country with almost no housing for them. Philip Klutznick and his partners at American Community Builders broke ground here in nineteen forty-seven on something brand new: a fully planned town with rental apartments, owner homes, schools, parks, and a shopping plaza all designed together. The project had been announced in Chicago on October twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-six, by Klutznick, Nathan Manilow, and Carroll Sweet, and the town planner Elbert Peets helped design it to house returning veterans.

The first families moved in during nineteen forty-eight. Park Forest became a laboratory for postwar American domesticity, famously studied by sociologist William H. Whyte in his nineteen fifty-six book The Organization Man, which found that people here joined bowling leagues and block parties and intense civic participation, a new kind of community built from scratch on old prairie soil.

In nineteen fifty-four, Park Forest was named an All-America City for its part in creating Rich Township High School. Today the village lies mostly in Cook County, with a small southern portion in Will County.