The first person to sign a lease for Park Forest’s original townhouses, being built in 1948, was an ex-Army engineer named Ed Waterman, who wanted to move up, literally, from the basement he and his wife were living in at the time.
And Fred Peterman recalls that before he moved to Park Forest in 1953, finding housing in Chicago was a matter of black-market bargaining.
“I had to pay some guy under the table for a no-bedroom apartment where the bed came out of the wall,” he said. “If you were like me, a 900-square-foot house looked like a monster.”
It was the Watermans and Petermans throughout the land who created the surge of demand that led to the Park Forests, the Levittowns and thousands of other smaller tracts of cookie-cutter housing that sprung up in cornfields and (in the case of Long Island’s Levittown) potato fields in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
They came from cities like New York and Chicago where apartment buildings were crammed to bursting in neighborhoods that had deteriorated from neglect during World War II.
They wanted places to raise families. Their primary concern was not esthetics. At least for the time being, they loved their little boxes.
And they were of a generation that had come through the Depression and the war and emerged victorious. The faith that American know-how and technology could create a new and better way of living, out beyond the last train stop, was overwhelming.
“There was a psychology of success following failure that gave these individuals a vision founded in optimism that no problem was too great to solve,” said Donald Hackl, president of the Chicago architectural firm of Loebl, Schlossman and Hackl, the successor to the firm that laid out Park Forest.
The financial underpinning of the postwar suburban surge had actually been created during the Depression, when the Federal Housing Authority was created, and with it the 30-year self-amortizing mortgage.
Prior to that historic economic stimulus measure, high home down payments and short-term loans had put homeowning out of reach for the majority of Americans.
When war’s end unleashed demand, and with long-term, FHA-backed mortgage financing in place, a rush to own homes was inevitable. But why in Park Forest, Levittown and the like?
Why not more row houses in the central cities, or big apartment blocks such as were constructed after the war in Europe?
Part of the answer was the availability of cheap land. In the case of Park Forest, Chicago builder Nathan Manilow was able to buy up 2,300 acres south of Olympia Fields for $750,000, some of paid for with government loans.
Manilow, Philip Klutznick, former wartime chief of housing construction for the federal government, architect Jerrold Loebl and others formed American Community Builders to plan and construct the village.
But the most basic factor was, of course, the centrality of the single-family home in the American imagination. The detached home, set on its own lot away from city vice and squalor, had become inextricably embedded in the national culture as the ideal place to raise a family.
After World War II, government mortgage programs and other subsidies and the new energies of builders combined to topple the only barrier between Americans and their dreams–lack of money.
With the government-backed financing, the builders would give the new generation of war vets affordable homes–ever so humble as they might have been.
And often they were quite humble indeed. After an initial salvo of rental townhome construction, which put more than 3,000 units into the ground between 1949 and 1950, the builders of Park Forest constructed their first for-sale detached housing.
Some of the houses, called ranch-style in an historic example of architectural delusion, were as small as 650 square feet–the amplitude of a good-size studio apartment today.
In the first group of about 1,300 homes built in the town between 1950 and 1952, almost 1,000 were one-story, two-bedroom brick boxes with identical floor plans and no garages.
There were 14 different exterior stylings–different placement of the doors, some stone trim, etc.–but other than that they were exactly the same house.
Old-timers recall that many Park Forest residents moved in before the houses had street numbers, and the only way a visitor could distinguish one house from another was the color of the asphalt roof tile. If two houses on the same block had green tile, deliveries could easily go astray.
In Levittown, N.Y., one of the Levittown communities that have come to symbolize home building in the immediate postwar era even more than Park Forest, nearly 17,500 houses were built in former Long Island potato fields between 1947 and 1951, and there, too, smallness and sameness prevailed.
The style there was called Cape Cod in deference to Eastern rather than Midwestern ideas, and the houses had more steeply pitched roofs. But style was not the point. The Levittown homes could be built in assembly line fashion and sold for $6,000 to $9,000.
In Park Forest, where the early homes sold for about $13,000, the developer had a sawmill and a concrete factory built in town for maximum construction efficiency.
Peterman, 69, who now is senior vice president at the Seven Bridges golf course development in Woodridge, said he objected to the sameness of the houses when he was a salesman.
“They’d build 600 to 800 at a crack and set the price level at the lowest common denominator so nobody’s house was worth more than the last resale,” he said.
After 1952, American Community Builders began to mix in other home types that have come to be emblematic of building in the immediate postwar era–Levittown-type two-story frame Cape Codders and “Futura” frame one-story models with slightly slanted roofs, overhanging eaves and carports. In 1957 the company began to produce another postwar American classic, the split-level.
The early homes, their relentless sameness and their price uniformity, in a certain way were seen as symbolizing a virtue: They represented the egalitarian, inclusive society that Americans had fought to protect.
And at Park Forest in particular, the chief builders and planners consciously tried to shape the town so it would stimulate community and neighborliness.
“The home was not the highest priority in terms of the concept,” said Hackl. “The homes were looked at as a series of objects in a park. The whole idea was to create a community environment that was heretofore nonexistent.”
The chief planner, Richard Bennett, had been head of the architecture department at Yale University and had developed ideas about land planning as the creation of paths for communication.
Narrow, curvilinear streets were to slow down traffic so residents could visit their neighbors across the street more easily. Alleys were eliminated from the plan so people could interact with their neighbors in their back yards, Hackl said. Front-yard fences were banned. (To this day, only small, “decorative” front-yard fences are allowed.)
The developers not only provided land for parks and schools but also for churches and synagogues, because they felt that religious institutions were an important social force.
Klutznick decided to foster the democratic spirit further by pushing for early incorporation and turning the town government over to residents rather than keeping decision-making for the developers until late in the building process, which often happened elsewhere.
One result: Klutznick was derided and reviled in open forums when the frantic pace and money-saving methods of construction inevitably led to complaints of water leaks, paper-thin walls and seas of mud instead of sidewalks.
Eventually, however, residents softened toward Klutznick and began to take pride in the community spirit that he had envisioned. Park Forest gained a reputation as a progressive community that it retains today.
In that regard, Park Forest differed from many of the other suburban agglomerations of the postwar era. But in the physical dimension–the small, cheap houses, the monotony, the curved streets, it was typical.
And it came to typify postwar suburbia in another way when it was featured in the popular 1950s book, “The Organization Man,” by William H. Whyte Jr.
In Park Forest husbands Whyte saw the representatives of a new breed–the managers and junior executives who traded their individuality for lifelong security in big companies. In their wives, he saw women who threw themselves into relentless socializing–just that community spirit that Klutznick idealized–but were in danger of paying for it with a rigid conformity.
Social critics since then have made the postwar suburb an automatic synonym for blandness, mindless consumerism and general soullessness in America.
“Materially, it embodies large scale organization and mass production, in its relentless uniformity, its use of a narrow range of designs repeated endlessly without true variation or relief,” wrote Robert Fishman, summarizing the views of Whyte and others in his influential 1987 book, “Bourgeois Utopias.”
“Socially, it is dominated by `organization men’–men whose personalities have been formed by the requirements of working smoothly in large organizations, and women who exist largely to provide the home environment these men need to exist,” he added.
Those attacks on Park Forest and its ilk seem curiously dated today, when job security is a chimera, when most wives are out working instead of providing the “home environment,” and when the social spirit of early Park Forest is regarded with a glow of nostalgia in the context of laments for the loss of community.
And indeed, the casual visitor to contemporary Park Forest sees a village that is almost quaint, with its little homes remodeled, expanded and personalized over the years, their once-raw brick walls weathered to mellowness, and the trees in their yards thick-trunked and gnarled.
Perhaps the argument against the Park Forests that is most valid today is that they helped draw the middle class out of the central cities and helped to divide society. What was intended as a satellite to the central city has become part of a doughnut–over-rich in its outer ring.
The homes and the land plan of Park Forest itself have held up remarkably well, thanks in part to a town government unusually vigilant in making sure the housing stock is maintained.
But the town shopping center, the first partially covered suburban shopping mall in the region when it was built, has decayed, and the Marshall Field & Co. store that was there for 42 years is being vacated and taken over by the village.
Ironically, the plan for the center is to make it look more like the traditional urban downtown that village pioneers left behind. There is to be a main street lined with small shops and adjoined by high-density residential development such as townhouses. That’s today’s answer to encouraging community sociability.
The original Park Forest “stood the test of time for many years, and even today serves a purpose,” said Hackl. “But the bottom line is, we don’t live in a static society where a set of design principles is valid in perpetuity.”
