Lovers of oxymora-self-contradictory expressions, ”wise fool,” ”sweet sorrow”-should revel in the idea of the history of Woodridge.
Pee-wee Herman is older than this town. America was already in the space race by the time the village was incorporated in the middle of a vast expanse of Du Page County farmland in 1959.
But in little more time than it takes some communities to switch mayors, Woodridge has risen seemingly intact from between the furrows. Most of the farmers have sold out by now, and the population stands at more than 27,000.
Other areas in Du Page have grown faster, Naperville and Aurora among them, but few have done it from scratch, moving from farmland toward landlock, the way Woodridge has.
”Maybe change seems painted with a broader brush when you grow up on a farm,” says Herb Nadelhoffer, a descendant of one of the original farming families, sitting on a bench overlooking Lake Harriet in the village`s center. Or maybe change seems more dramatic when the fishing lines of today`s small boys are cast into what used to be the hayfields of one`s youth.
The lake is named for Nadelhoffer`s mother, Harriet. It was his father, Carleton, who stood once-somewhere near where the shallows are now-and posed for posterity with one of his prized dairy cows. The picture, dated 1952, sits at Herb Nadelhoffer`s side 37 years later. And in it, there is not a building on the horizon, nor a lake.
Arching above the treeline several hundred yards to Herb`s left today are the tops of two silos marking the vacant homestead he grew up on. In the mid-` 50s, the farm still had one ( 3 Block spaces, for 0.13 Picas. )of the highest-producing dairy herds in Illinois.
But it wouldn`t be long before the handwriting was on the barnyard wall. By 1958, the first homes had sprouted up in subdivisions to the south. One year later, in August of 1959, 48 new residents scheduled a referendum and voted unanimously to incorporate as a village. It would be named Woodridge, after the local golf course.
The developer of the first subdivisions, Albert Kaufman, president of Surety Builders, predicted an influx of 12,000 people and 3,000 homes into the area within the first three years after incorporation, according to George Willenborg, who wrote a thesis on the village early in the 1970s. Kaufman had such a lock on the village that the local paper somtimes forgot to refer to him by name, instead calling him ”the builder.”
”It was to be a complete community planned from scratch,” said Leon Werch, 77, the village`s first mayor. ”That was (Kaufman`s) dream.” The builder donated land for schools, he said, and rented out a vacant house to the village board. He rented an old barn to the village for use as a fire station for $1 a year.
Kaufman, now 75, estimates he eventually built between 1,700 and 2,000 houses and apartments in the village. His prediction on growth would come true-not in three years, but in about 10.
Development hit a snag at one point when the Du Page County Building Department stopped issuing building permits, according to Willenborg. One day, it seems, the sanitary treatment facilities had become overburdened.
”The water was going into the heat register and I screamed (to my husband) the European way, `Frank!` ” recalled Louise Schneider, one of the first residents. ”I found every color of toilet paper in my basement.” She finally just opened up the sliding glass doors and washed it all down the hill.
According to Kaufman, the rains had been heavy and many of the residents had diverted rain water into the sewage system. The problem was solved, and the growth continued, though not always as planned.
”What happened, of course, is Al`s dream . . . never developed,” Werch said. Hero to some, villain to others, Kaufman became the focus of village politics. Everyone, almost all of whom had homes built by Surety, took sides. Kaufman`s plans began to come under more and more scrutiny by the village board.
According to Willenborg, one plat was disapproved, then approved, then again disapproved, then finally approved again before Kaufman was allowed to build. At one point, legend has it, Kaufman threatened to simply cancel the lease on village hall. After all, he owned it.
Home prices ranged from $12,000 to $18,000 a year, slightly less than the median of $20,400 throughout the rest of the county. Many were prefabricated homes trucked in from Lafayette, Ind., according to Werch. The American dream on a flatbed; just add water and sewer.
”Everything came on top of a truck and was put on top of a foundation that was poured in one day,” Werch said.
”Did I envision what it would be now?” asked Kaufman, who still runs his development business out of offices in Woodridge. ”No. I would have to say my vision was more utopian than what we have here. But it had to be done in stages.”
About 80 percent of the homes in the village were bought through the G.I. Bill, said Kaufman. Homes that cost $17,000 could be bought for no money down, and people with no money in the bank could have a piece of land.
Louise Schneider is an example. She grew up in Nazi Germany and, after seeing her homeland reduced to rubble by the war, married one of the Americans who occupied it after the war. She was a war bride who had moved to the City of Chicago. The suburbs held the promise of a better life.
”What are you gonna do out there, raise frogs?” Frank had asked Louise when she came home one day and announced she had just put $5 down on a house that didn`t exist yet in a field somewhere southwest of Chicago in 1959.
”I was the pioneer,” she says 30 years later, just months after paying off her mortgage. ”We just took a risk. You have no idea how it was. No streets. No stores. No churches.”
Even by the mid-`60s, the land was still largely undeveloped and the atmosphere pastoral. Some of the more serious crimes in April of 1964, as listed in a local paper, were a missing manhole cover and a boy stuck in a tree.
”It was so what I call in German friedlich , so quiet and easygoing,”
said Schneider. ”There was no crime here. We left our doors open.”
But if Woodridge were still rural America, where the most serious concerns included how to keep the cows off the bluegrass, there came plentiful evidence in 1968 that the rest of an often troubled world, indeed at times the center of it, was not that far away.
Nadelhoffer that year supported Eugene McCarthy for president, the former Minnesota senator behind whose candidacy many student protesters would rally during the Democratic National Convention to be held in August in Chicago. Word came out from the city early in the week, said Nadelhoffer, that rooms were at a premium and some of the students needed a place to stay. So he sent a letter to the central committee offices for McCarthy offering a few beds on his farm 25 miles southwest of the city.
”Somehow that letter got read out in Grant Park after the violence, so kids started showing up,” said Nadelhoffer. Where he and his wife expected maybe seven, 700 showed up, many bloodied and bruised from confrontations with the National Guard. Nadelhoffer`s mother-in-law bandaged heads, while a steady stream of students called home to tell their parents they were in Chicago-er, Woodridge-and were okay.
By the early 1970s, the 170-acre Nadelhoffer farm was bordered by development to the north and south. The farm, in effect, had become a bridge, linking two distinctly separate subdivisions. Woodridge had turned into a community without a center.
According to Joni Mimnaugh, president of the Woodridge Historical Society, the development of the town from that point forth was ”one man`s dream”-Herb Nadelhoffer`s.
Nadelhoffer was more than a farmer. In the early 1970s, he was teaching school while working on a doctorate in public address and group communication at Northwestern University. His wife was a Yale graduate who taught Russian as a sideline.
Realizing, he said, that the best opportunity for influencing the imminent development of remaining space was offering as much land as possible to a single developer with similar dreams, he convinced about half a dozen other farm owners to pool more than 400 acres and pitch in to pay for a development proposal. Thirty-five percent of the land would remain open space. Of the drawings that resulted, the most faded and yellow today are bold sketches of a jutting promontory of buildings rising up from the fields. The towers were to become a focal point for the village, a cultural, commercial and residential center ”complete with the open plaza indigenous to every great village, town, or city man has built,” according to a 28-page development proposal drawn up by architects hired from California in 1970.
But the past would prevail as well. The cows that once stood on open land at the corner of 71st Street and Janes Avenue would not be lost, only moved slightly west. They were to become part of a planned 63-acre ”Environmental Education Center,” where the arts of animal husbandry, horticulture and ecology would be studied and preserved. A lake would be large enough for sailboats. Children and nature, cows and cars, creeks, woods and a shopping mall would all coexist.
The plans ran into trouble almost immediately when an alluring offer was made to the owner of 30 acres of woods directly abutting Nadelhoffer`s farm. In a last-ditch effort, Nadelhoffer approached William B. Greene, a local retired industrialist, and told him of the dilemma.
”He patted my hand at the end,” said Nadelhoffer, ”and he said, `I think you`re looking for an angel.` So I went home thinking that that was it. Well, the next day he called me up and he bought it.”
Greene, whose land donations eventually became part of Du Page County Forest Preserve and a Girl Scout camp, became part of the land pool. And though the alliance didn`t remain united forever-the developer they found backed out, and some members of the group began to doubt that Nadelhoffer`s dream would work-Herb held onto his 170 acres.
”Part of the dream,” Mimnaugh said, ”did come true.”
When Nadelhoffer eventually sold to the village park district, part of the land became Lake Harriet, part Lake Carleton. Nadelhoffer`s pleas to William Greene, according to Mimnaugh, staved off development and convinced the Girl Scouts of America to stay in Woodridge. Fifty acres of Girl Scout land remain open space today near the village center. And a farm next door to Nadelhoffer`s was sold to the city and now is the site of the library and village hall.
According to Richard Untch, Woodridge`s director of economic development, the village is still growing. Another 9,000 or 10,000 people will move to Woodridge before it is completely built out. The North-South Tollway soon will run directly through the village. Upscale developments are moving in.
Today, there is no Woodridge center the way Herb Nadelhoffer once envisioned it, but the lakes are there and the Nadelhoffer woods still stand. Still sitting on the bench overlooking Lake Harriet, Nadelhofer turns around and motions to the woods. Long before the developers came to town, long before the land was even owned by the Nadelhoffers, he says, these woods formed what became known as the Indian Boundary. The land initially was set aside as a corridor of safe passage both for Indians and settlers-a solitary swath of land on which divergent groups could mingle.
In the end, says Nadelhoffer, who now lives in Naperville, ”We got part of what we bargained for, and we didn`t get part of what we bargained for, and that`s life.”
