Like a Mortimer among Mikes, some place names stand out from the crowd of Main Streets and Park Avenues, Lake Streets and Maple Drives.
Imaginative and sometimes puzzling geographic designations dot the landscape of northern Illinois, verbal substitutes for the dramatic mountains and canyons that inspire vivid names in other parts of the world.
We have our abundance of Prairie Avenues and Madison Streets, but we also have some head-scratchers. Among them are two street names that read more like monograms: L.R.A. Drive in Aurora and L.E.M. Drive in Round Lake. One memorializes Lillian R. Alschuler, wife of an attorney and developer in the 1920s, while the other refers to an essential component of the Apollo moon missions, the Lunar Excursion Module. Then there are the names that seem ordinary but reveal odd twists on closer inspection. Glenview, for one, sounds simple enough, but it turns out that the particular glen view the name commemorates is the one from the upstairs windows at early resident Hugh Burnham’s house.
There’s enough repetition on local maps–Downers Grove, Sugar Grove, Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove, Long Grove, and Fox River Grove leap to mind, followed by Palos Park, Palos Heights and Palos Hills. (Odd that there’s no Palos Grove. . . .)
Here, instead, is a map of the oddities: the names that do more than describe a place, hark back to some other place or recycle a historical name.
One giant step for trailer parks: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Americans were in thrall with NASA’s lunar missions, Rudolph Magna Sr. and Al Valentin were developing a mobile-home park in Round Lake. Magna, his partner recalls, was caught up in it all when he was naming streets in the development, Cambridge Courts. He gave them labels like Apollo Court, Orbiter Drive, Moon Rover Drive, Lunar Drive and NASA Circle. (Rudy Magna Sr. later served as mayor of Round Lake. He died in November 1996. His son, also named Rudy, is the attorney for the Round Lake Sanitary District, with which Valentin has been associated since the late 1960s.)
Where you can Seymour trees: Although a lovely waterfall spills over weathered slabs of rock in the tract of forest preserve called Waterfall Glen, that’s not the source from which the name flows. Instead, the doughnut-shaped green belt surrounding Argonne National Laboratory south of Darien is named for Seymour “Bud” Waterfall, onetime president of the DuPage County Forest Preserve board.
Romeo and . . . Joliet: In the first half of the 19th Century, the city of Joliet was named Juliet. Depending on whom you ask, the name came either from Shakespeare’s play or from a settler with a daughter named Juliet. Either way, settlers of another town a few miles north on the Des Plaines River named their place Romeo to give Juliet a companion.
But in 1845 leaders of Juliet changed the name to Joliet to honor the voyageur Louis Jolliet. (The misspelling was compounded over a century later with the opening of the Louis Joliet Mall.)
In 1895, Romeo was incorporated as Romeoville.
Some people say this tale is the height of romantic drivel, of course. But it’s great trivia, nevertheless.
Hollywood boulevards: In the 1920s, developer S.H. Bartlett touted a rural area north of Waukegan as a tranquil retreat from Chicago’s hustle. A movie fan, he named the streets he laid out in Beach Park after Hollywood luminaries of the era: Chaney, Chaplin, Fairbanks, Griffith, Hart, Pickford and Talmadge.
Hollywood boulevards–the sequel: Hanover Park’s tribute to movie stars is a double feature. Two separate subdivisions in the town, which is immediately west of Schaumburg, have celebrity street names. (There’s no record in town of why so many actors were honored; they were all named over two decades ago by developers who are now out of business.)
One subdivision has a ring of cul-de-sacs named Cooper, Crawford, Crosby, Gable, Garland, Grant, Monroe and Turner. To its east is a development where the streets are named Barrymore, Chaplin, Curtis, Fonda, Garbo, Niven, MacLaine, Redford, Rooney, Sinatra and Tracy. Plus these two oddities: Between Barrymore and Tracy is Stairway Drive (Sure, you’ve seen ALL his movies!); and a few blocks away lies Lemon Lane–either a misspelled tribute to Jack Lemmon or a comment on some of the movies these other Hollywood honorees made.
BTFL DWNTWN FRVG: The biggest town name in the region belongs to one of our littlest towns: Fox River Valley Gardens, or FRVG, as village president Jack Motley likes to call it. Dating from the 1930s, the name refers to the fertile farmland irrigated by a system of channels off the Fox. The four-word moniker is such a mouthful that the municipality’s receptionist answers the phone with only “The Village Hall.”
The only lakes that count: Lake County, Ill., is not named for the Great Lake lapping at it shores, but for the dozens of lakes and ponds that dot its landscape. Too many lakes to count, it seems. Somebody once started, but didn’t get far. Beginning at a body of water that is very near the center of the county and going northwest, the lakes used to be called First, Second, Third and Fourth. First later became Gages Lake and Second became Druce Lake, but Third Lake and Fourth Lake remain.
A K A Riddle Road: No records exist explaining the source of the name of Agatite Avenue, at 4432 North in Chicago. Lots of investigators have tried to define Agatite, with no success. Is it a variant on the mineral known as agate, or the tree called agati, or the component of human teeth called apatite? If you say so.
But if Dan had married Wilhelmina . . . : South of Wheaton is a forest preserve called Danada–a name that’s also on several streets nearby. The land used to be the country estate of grain broker Dan Rice and his wife, Ada, who trained a Kentucky Derby winner there in the early 1960s. The Rices’ Lucky Debonair won the 1965 Run for the Roses.
Look both ways: A call to the Field Museum confirms that Northbrook has never been home to caribou, even thousands of years ago. And yet signs in Winchester Lane North, a townhouse development in the suburb announce “Caribou Crossing.” Developer David Hoffman conferred the street’s name, along with Deer Trail Court and Four Winds Lane, as a nod to his favorite ski town–Aspen, Colo.–when building the townhouses from 1988 to 1990.
Could you be a little more specific? Loyola University, always proud of its link to the Catholic Church, named the mammoth new gym on its Rogers Park campus for donor Joseph Gentile.
The classrooms are a hive of activity: Local legend in Glendale Heights says that Queen Bee Elementary School District 16 got its name at the turn of the century when an old-timer recalled that the original school building had once been infested with bees. Getting rid of the pests entailed eliminating their queen.
A city of two tales: Harvey, a south suburb, was named in a compromise. One of the original land owners, Turlington Harvey, wanted to name the budding town Turlington, but others wanted to honor local industrialist Harvey Hopkins. The name Harvey satisfied both camps.
