An empty whiskey bottle in a kitchen cabinet at the Christian Dorband-Charles Albee Howe House wears a ”Homewood Straight Bourbon” label decorated with a racing scene.
The makers of that obscure brand have disappeared, gone with the bourbon and most of a century.
Just as well. Homewood, the village, always rejected any specific association with fast horses and hard liquor.
That yellowing label refers to Washington Park racetrack, which burned down in 1977 and in its heyday covered much of Homewood`s eastern edge, south of the point where Halsted and 175th Streets intersect.
Old whiskey bottles notwithstanding, Washington Park never did define the community. For people living nearby, the track merely represented predictable traffic congestion.
”The residents knew you didn`t come home around 10 o`clock at night down Halsted, because you were just not going to make it,” remembers village president John T. Doody Jr. ”The crowds would be pouring out, so you had to adjust your schedule accordingly.”
Homewood officials are slowly buying up what`s left of the 160-acre Washington Park site, a process complicated over the years by an ever-changing lineup of private owners. Offices and a few houses line part of the old racetrack periphery, but most of the space has reverted to prairie growth and placid lagoon.
”I guess, ideally, it would be a Fortune 500 international headquarters surrounded by a golf course,” Doody says. But short of that, he wants the old Washington Park to fill up with offices and other quiet developments, adding to the tax base without crowding the school system, hindering the flow of automobiles or burdening the infrastructure.
It would seem that a majority of the 19,278 Homewood residents have mandated their government to keep the village nearly as quiet as it must have been in 1891, when the little brick Christian Dorband-Charles Albee Howe House on 183rd Street was built.
The whiskey bottle so deceptively evocative of a fast-track Homewood stands on display along with scores of other artifacts in that house, which has been lovingly restored by the Homewood Historical Society. Now a museum, it was built for Christian Dorband, a brickyard employee who worked for early Homewood industrialist Henry Gottschalk. The late Charles and Hertha Howe bought it in 1940, and Hertha Howe donated it to the society in 1982.
Like so many of the towns that surround it, Homewood (meaning, simply, a home in the wood) incorporated in 1893, primarily because the German immigrant settlers thought crowds visiting the great World`s Columbian Exposition of that year would somehow wander 17 miles south and contribute to their prosperity.
That never happened in a big way, but the logic was sound. The Illinois Central tracks darted through the area as early as 1853, and soon after the turn of the century, wealthy Chicagoans were using the trains to reach the golf courses they had built in Homewood and neighboring hamlets.
Rather than take the last train home at 9:30, cutting short their soirees and card games, the wealthy built summer residences west of the tracks, near Ravisloe Country Club. They pursued the good life there until the Great Depression forced many of them to choose between living in the city or turning their cottages into year-round homes. Several families chose to stay in Homewood.
The village boomed shortly after World War II. Now, houses, businesses and parks fill nearly all of the available land. For years, the downtown, which spreads out from the intersection of Ridge Road and Dixie Highway, looked like so many central districts subject to growth spurts during the golden age of postwar functionalist architecture: boxy and unfashionably dated.
In the coming months, the pragmatic look is supposed to disappear, replaced by brick-decorated sidewalks, vintage street lamps and charming facades on the storefronts. Money for the project came from a $1.5 million bond issue backed by tax-increment financing, a statutory device that earmarks property taxes for specific areas.
The village will match with building owners the costs of adding new Renaissance Revival facades, while the Bank of Homewood provides low-interest loans to those who take part in the beautification.
”We`ve needed sidewalks for a long time. They were deplorable,” says Michael Ryan, president of the Homewood Chamber of Commerce and owner of the Ryan Funeral Home. ”The purpose of all the new curbs, gutters, lighting and facades is to revitalize all the businesses in town, to create the atmosphere that would be particularly inviting to people with businesses and to keep the existing businesses strong.”
Not every Homewood entrepreneur greeted the invasion of backhoes, jackhammers and cement trucks with the reverence accorded it by civic leaders. During the height of construction, for example, the marquee in front of the popular Tom`s Family Restaurant said waggishly, ”Welcome to Homewood. Under Construction.”
One store owner, who asked for anonymity in the interests of village harmony, was reluctant to endorse the project as a panacea: ”Not being business people, the people who are making these studies don`t truly know what brings customers to shops and what doesn`t. And when they make a statement like, `people are going to see the sidewalks and stop and come in and buy` -oh, give me a break.”
Still, the prevailing hope seems to be that Homewood might become something of a destination town, a place outsiders would find worth an afternoon of strolling, shopping and dining in such ambitious establishments as the downtown neon-and-Art Deco palace, Eughie; the strikingly refurbished Villa Fiore; the busy Cafe Bianco; or the original Aurelio`s pizzeria.
During a previous stab at cosmetics, the village commissioned noted New York trompe l`oeil artist Richard Haas (noted in this region for his work on the apartment building at LaSalle and Division Streets in Chicago) to paint the drab and exposed rear ends of certain downtown buildings to look like a chic commercial district of the 1920s and `30s.
Haas declined to paint the facades in the mode of the Victorian era, but as a concession to deep nostalgia he did capture the reflection of the nearby Gottschalk mansion in the ”glass” of a faux bay window.
For those looking to settle permanently, rather than merely sight-see, Homewood proudly extends what it considers the best of the essentials. ”We`ve certainly got an awful lot to offer,” says William F. (Fran) Moore of F.W. Prindiville Real Estate. ”We have excellent schools, good transportation and access to other areas with toll roads.
”I think, dollar for dollar, you can get much more house for your money here than you can get anywhere else in the Chicago metropolitan area, when you consider the amenities.
”I`ve been here since 1947, and even going back to my early days here, there was always been an intermingling of new with old. You might have on any given block houses that are 80 or 90 years old and some that are 20 years old. The newer people fixed up their homes and did good lawns and good landscaping, and if a man was in a house that at that time was 50 or 60 years old, he took another look at his house and thought, `Maybe I should be doing something with mine.` ”
Besides the housing stock, residents never fail to point out the successes – both academic and athletic – of the Homewood school system and Homewood-Flossmoor Community High School.
The parents of Jill Fazzini, elected this spring by her classmates as the outstanding high school senior, moved from another nearby town when Jill was 3 years old because they wanted the best available education for her and her older sister, Laurie.
”I liked all the education that I had,” Fazzini says when asked to enumerate the outstanding characteristics of the place where she was raised.
”Homewood-Flossmoor high school was great. I ran into some incredible teachers.”
Fazzini plans to attend Miami University in Ohio in the fall. Her sister is a junior at Indiana University. Fazzini describes Homewood as a nurturing environment, devoid of cliques. ”The neighborhoods are nice, kind of quaint, and my friends came from all over,” she says.
Doody, the village president, notes that Homewood citizens expect a lot from their institutions and willingly give them the wherewithal to succeed.
”Homewood is probably one of the few communities that not only just passed a school referendum but did it by an overwhelming margin,” he points out.
”In a day and age when people are getting clobbered by taxes, you would not expect a referendum to pass, let alone overwhelmingly,” Doody marvels,
”but the expectation was that this was something necessary to keep up the quality of life in Homewood and something that we had to do. I think it was estimated that only 20 percent of the people in the district actually had kids in the system, so it was the senior citizens and everybody – a cross-section- saying this was necessary.”
The Homewood-Flossmoor park system enjoys the same kind of heavy support, and much of the community life swirls around its facilities. ”The busier that lifestyles have become, the more people demand recreation,” observes park district spokeswoman Lisa Wick. ”Most families are two-income families out of necessity, and they really need to find the time to do family things. The park district provides a lot of opportunities for family togetherness.”
A 40-page park district brochure lists an almost overwhelming number of activities, ranging from bocce ball to tennis. Not only does the district maintain swimming pools, but residents can frolic on a large pond called Dolphin Lake. Facilities include a fully equipped racquet club, a community center with a hectic schedule of activities for all age groups and a band shell for outdoor concerts. If the street corners appear deserted most of the time, it simply may be that Homewood offers so many alternatives to hanging out.
The 2-year-old library building bustles as well, with a wide range of programs and concerts of its own. ”Just before it opened, to save money, the whole village got involved by going in and checking out 20 books at a time,” recalls Chamber president Ryan. ”Then they came back the next week, after the library had moved to the new place, and returned the books.”
”It`s a town that takes care of itself,” says Elaine Egdorf, president of the Homewood Historical Society. ”The community believes in what they have.” Egdorf remembers an event not long ago when the library presented a concert by jazz great Art Hodes, and she and her husband, Gerald, decided to make an evening of it.
”The concert cost $5 apiece, and my husband told me not to cook,”
Egdorf remembers. ”We went to Tom`s Restaurant and had their Friday night special. He had macaroni and cheese and I had fish. We were only a block from the library. Afterward, I said, `Can you believe this? A night out for two for under $20!` ”
And like so many residents of Homewood, the Egdorfs could have their inexpensive entertainment among their chums. Gatherings in the village cannot be impersonal. ”This place has a small-town, friendly atmosphere to it,”
Ryan declares.
During one community celebration, the Egdorfs set up a booth to sell bricks salvaged from the old Gottschalk brickworks, the same kind that were used to build the Christian Dorband-Charles Albee Howe House. ”Homewood” had been chiseled into the face of those 100-year-old bricks at the time of manufacture, so they make a nice souvenir.
”A newcomer came up to the booth, and I asked her why she had bought a house here,” Elaine Egdorf recalls. ”She says, `Well, we looked all over, but when we got to Homewood, it just felt like home.` ”
