The sound was like a horde of steroid-fed mosquitoes, the high-pitched whirr first coming at you, then receding, then cycling over again and again. The intermittent silence of the downshift was the giveaway that the origin was mechanical.
On warm summer nights in the 1970s and ’80s you could hear it for miles around this out-of-the way corner of Cook County. And if you followed the sound down Wolf Road, to where it almost zigzags into the Des Plaines River, you would find the source — and the smoke, the crowds and the cars.
Santa Fe Speedway was a mecca, of sorts. The site started out as a picnic grove in the 1930s, and construction of the track proceeded in the 1950s. The speedway evolved into a major attraction in later years, fed by a constant barrage of 50,000-watt radio ads that drew fans from around the Midwest. But changing times and shifting populations cost the little clay track much of its audience, and the operation was shuttered in 1993.
The closing of Santa Fe Speedway is ironic in that auto racing has never been so popular. Sportsman’s Park in Cicero was rebuilt last year to accommodate both car and horse races, and speedway developers have proffered competing proposals in various suburbs, including Joliet, for a major new track.
But a different course is being charted for the 50 acres that once housed the speedway, and an adjacent 53 acres at 91st Street and County Line Road that owners had kept in their hands to provide some sort of buffer to the din.
While track builders search for land farther out in the hinterlands, home builders have snatched up the Santa Fe property, which now is considered a rare and valuable in-fill parcel.
“The demand is there for the housing. And in-fill projects like this — close to the city, with great schools — are probably the most sought-after kind,” said Dan Regan, president of Oak Builders Inc. “It’s a great location, in Cook County but across the street from DuPage County. And if you look at the towns around here, where can you put together 100 acres like this?”
Regan’s firm, along with Faganel Management and Development Concepts LLC, will put up 90 single-family homes and 131 townhouses in the master-planned Willow Ridge community. Forty acres of the hilly, wooded site will be left as open space with dedicated tree preserves and jogging trails. Single-family houses are priced from about $425,000 to $660,000 and up, while the townhouses will start in the mid-$200,000s.
But Willow Ridge represents more than the demise of a once-loved racetrack. It also represents a dichotomy between the new and the old in Willow Springs, the southwest suburban town of 4,500 to which the project was annexed.
Willow Springs was settled by the diggers of the Illinois & Michigan Canal back in 1833. It was incorporated in 1892, with the Santa Fe Railway tracks on the north, 87th Street on the south, Mannheim Road on the east and the Cook-DuPage county line on the west.
Its reputation as a party town grew during Prohibition, when the streetcar lines down Archer Avenue brought revelers from the city to drink in the village’s road houses and dance at its Oh Henry Ballroom. The seemier side of its image includes association with Al Capone, who supposedly ran some of the Archer speakeasys and maintained a hideout along German Church Road. Willow Springs has been tainted in the more recent past by scandals of police and municipal corruption.
“Our biggest problem today is that there are not enough houses for sale. This is a popular destination, close to the city,” said Joanne Kozlowksi, a broker-associate with Cantigny Realty, Willow Springs’ sole local realty office. “Most of the housing in the old part of Willow Springs (east of the Des Plaines River bridge) is owned by third-generation Willow Springs families. West of the bridge, where all the development is, well, those people don’t even come on our side.”
And Willow Ridge was almost the flashpoint for a border war between Willow Springs and Burr Ridge, its neighbor to the west and north, over just what kind of development would be allowed to proceed on the speedway parcels and nearly 400 more acres on nearby unincorporated land bordered on the north by 83rd Street, on the south by the Des Plaines River, on the east by Wolf Road and on the west by County Line Road.
“We had the opportunity to annex to Burr Ridge and we chose Willow Springs,” Regan said. “Burr Ridge wanted larger lot sizes and that would have pushed our prices up. We didn’t want to be in that market. There are a lot of million-dollar homes around here, but there are not a lot of $500,000 homes.”
Burr Ridge considers County Line Road a gateway to its village and wanted a fixed border agreement with Willow Springs. But the late Willow Springs mayor James Quas wanted the two villages to agree to a planning concept for the area and let developers choose which village they wanted for annexation. Eventually, each village produced its own plan for the area, although they are mostly alike.
While Faganel’s lots will average about 12,000 square feet, Oak Builders’ home sites will average just under 20,000 square feet.
“We blend together so the home buyers can have a choice in some of the products,” Regan said. “We expect to draw people from everywhere — from downtown, from nearby suburbs, from as far as Naperville for people who don’t want that kind of commute. And we know there are local buyers who want to upgrade. There really is no other new development in this price range within 7 or 10 miles.”
Willow Ridge will include three distinct neighborhoods:
– Oak Builders is developing The Reserve of Willow Ridge with 40 single-family homes on 1/2-acre home sites. Each site is suitable for a walk-out or look-out basement. Prices for the 3,100- to 4,500-square-foot homes start in the upper $400,000s, including home site.
– The Knolls of Willow Ridge, also by Oak Builders, will include 13 single-family homes on wooded 1-acre lots with walk-out and look-out basements. Prices start in the upper $400,000s, including site.
– The Windings of Willow Ridge by Faganel will have 37 single-family homes on 1/4-acre sites with some walk-out basements, priced from the low $400,000s, including site, and 131 townhouses priced from the mid-$200,000s. Two single-family models are nearing completition, with five townhouse models set for March opening.
The homes all feature brick-and-cedar construction with a variety of amenities. In addition, the community is located in the Pleasantdale Elementary School district, which has won national academic honors, and Lyons Township High School district.
“There is pent-up interest in an area like this,” said Mark Malouf, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Montalbano Homes, which built the Fairway Club, a townhouse project annexed two years ago into Willow Springs. “Willow Springs is one of those sleepy little towns with a home-town atmosphere. It’s actually a couple of different towns in one.”
As elsewhere, the hot housing market surrounding Willow Springs — especially in towns such as Hinsdale, LaGrange and Burr Ridge — is allowing sellers to get top dollar for their single-family homes, which they, in turn, are willing to plow back into luxuries and comforts in their new homes. Montalbano was able to sell out the original 76 townhouses, plus 27 more that it built on adjacent land purchased after the development started, in 18 months.
That kind of success has Oak Builders thinking beyond Willow Ridge. Regan said the builder is seeking approval for a 20-unit townhouse project near 87th and Wolf Road. Prices for the units, which would be primarily ranch-style, would start in the high $200,000s, Regan said. The village has granted preliminary plat approval for the project, which is on a 4-acre, former single-family home site that Regan purchased adjacent to the Chalet Sports Center.
But Kozlowski, a licensed real estate agent for 35 years and a nurse for 50, doesn’t expect Willow Ridge or any of the other new developments to lure many Willow Springs buyers from her side of the river.
“The people who are buying on the west side of the canal are coming from the city, or from the north,” she said. (The Des Plaines River bridge also spans the Illinois & Michigan canal, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal and two sets of railroad tracks in Willow Springs.)
And by the same token, few of the potential buyers in the new developments like Willow Ridge are likely to come calling on Kozlowski to look for a house in old Willow Springs.
“This is an old cowboy town. And most of the new people are not comfortable with that,” Kozlowski said. “But it is a gentle town. There is a lot of scandal that it’s overcome. Most of the people who come in this office are just looking at the woods, looking for a wooded site. And most of the houses on this side are under $200,000 — not that you can find any for sale.”
The “old” side of Willow Springs is not going to stand still, however. And Kozlowski’s own Catigny Realty office is a sign of changes to come. After 15 years in the preeminent corner position of the Old Willow commercial center at Archer and Willow Springs Road, the office has been relocated within the interior of the complex, making way for the kind of coffee shop that uses those newfangled espresso machines — and pays double the rent.
The village has created a tax increment financing district in a blighted area across Archer Avenue from the Old Willow center, which, in spite of the new coffee shop, has plenty of vacancies. A development partnership has already begun clearing the land for the Willow Springs Village Center, a mixed-use project that will include new municipal offices, a Metra station, restaurants, retail and banking space, 55 condominiums, a 150-unit senior housing component and 131 urban-style townhouses to be built by Ryland Homes.
Heritage Renaissance Partners has been assembling the land, which includes a defunct cement plant, for more than two years.
A significant element overriding the development of the village center is the connection of Willow Springs to the Illinois & Michigan Canal, a historic waterway corridor that parallels Archer Avenue through town.
“The plan for the center emulates a traditional canal town, which typically has a town square beside a Main Street and residential housing clusters,” said Stephen Yas, a partner in the architectural and design firm of Yas/Fischel in Evantson, the project’s master planner. “With a multitude of conveniences such as medical offices, a bank, a pet store, hair salon, restaurants and cafes, for instance, the village center will foster interaction among residents in their new gathering space.”
Yas thinks the Willow Springs project could be a model for other mixed-use urban and suburban downtown redevelopment projects with its emphasis on incorporating pedestrian pathways, bike trails and commuter walkways as a way to link the residential and commercial areas.
The use of different masonry elements and earth-tone colors, the addition of themed streetscaping and lighting and the setting aside of several types of open space will all add to the canal town/Main Street flavor of the project, Yas said.
“That will really start to jazz up the town,” Regan said.
But Malouf, whose company looked for another in-fill building site in the village but eventually went elsewhere, thinks that it may take more than a spiffy downtown plan to unite the two Willow Springs.
“It’s going to be a difficult transition,” he said.
