Riverside Illinois: Portage Path to Olmsted's Blueprint

The peninsula of land curled inside a loop of the Des Plaines River was never accidental territory. For centuries, Potawatomi people and their Anishinaabe relatives used this bend as a waypoint on trails connecting the Chicago Portage, the junction where Great Lakes canoe travel became Mississippi River travel, a short distance away. In the eighteen thirties, white settlement pressed in, and treaties forced the Potawatomi of this region west.

For the next three decades this ground reverted to farmland. A Chicago investor named Emery Childs saw its potential and in eighteen sixty-eight hired Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, fresh from designing Central Park, to turn sixteen hundred acres of flat prairie along the river into a residential community. Their eighteen sixty-nine plan introduced something revolutionary: curved streets that followed the land instead of a grid, shared parkland along the river, and a village green at the center. Riverside became the template for the American suburb, later designated a National Historic Landmark.

The plan was a demonstration that beauty and order were not luxuries. The bent river had held that idea long before him.