Jane Burke is used to change. For most of her life, the Naperville native watched the neighborhoods around her multiply, subdivision after subdivision. As she grew up, the town did too, from a barely five-figure population size to the fourth-largest city in Illinois.
But change isn’t what it used to be. Burke, now 76, says Naperville has started to creep in on itself, eyeing ways to infill as developable land dwindles.
Though a natural, and sometimes necessary product of growth, Burke and other local crusaders of Naperville history are keen to preserve — or at least document — longstanding properties around the city that have been caught in a recent wave of teardowns in favor of new development.
As of earlier this year, they have the documenting part down but preservation will take a little more time and consideration.
For the past year and a half, Naperville Preservation Inc. has made it its mission to catalog midcentury modern homes before they get demolished to make way for far-more expensive replacements. The areas most affected are East Highlands and River Haven Estates, two key subdivisions where these testaments to post-war development in Naperville abound.
Conducting two separate surveys, one in July 2022 and another in March, Naperville Preservation found that half of the East Highlands’ original 1950s-era homes have been torn down to make way for sizeable upgrades but original construction in River Haven Estates remains mostly intact.
The results surprised Naperville Preservation on both fronts, according to Burke, a director and founding member of the organization. The East Highlands is more overrun with new construction and River Haven Estates is less modernized than the group anticipated, she said.
On the whole, however, the architectural snapshot was just what Naperville Preservation was looking for with the fact-finding venture: a testimony to Naperville’s stock of aged homes before they all disappear. Still, retaining hope that complete redevelopment isn’t an inevitable outcome, the group has loftier aspirations to turn research into action.
Naperville Preservation’s focus now is how it can leverage survey results to encourage property owners to retain their midcentury modern homes. Awareness, Burke says, is the first step, and what her organization has been working on since starting the studies.
In late September, Naperville Preservation took their findings to a broader audience, sharing details in a community meeting at the Naperville Municipal Center. Some 100 people turned out for the presentation, an encouraging sign for the organization, which went into the meeting unsure of how residents would receive its work, Burke said.
“We didn’t really know, until we put everything together, how people were going to feel about this,” Burke said. “What we learned is that people are really hungry for Naperville history.”
The goal is that community interest will, eventually, translate into active preservation, Burke said.
Sitting inside her own midcentury Naperville home Wednesday night, Burke flipped through printed copies of the surveys her group commissioned this year and last.
The process started when the organization’s president, Becky Simon, went walking through the East Highlands during the pandemic and saw more than a few active teardowns, Burke said. The redevelopment, and where it was happening, caught Simon’s attention.
The East Highlands — roughly bounded by Prairie Avenue on the north, Burr Oak Park on the south, Columbia Street on the east and the DuPage River on the west — is significant, Burke said, because it was the first commercial subdivision of its scale and type in Naperville.
“It really was the beginning of Naperville changing from being a farm town to being a suburb,” she said.
With the East Highlands, which was developed in 1954, a new trend towards expanding Naperville out into open land set in. The effort was led by local resident and real estate developer Harold Moser, who was ultimately responsible for defining a significant portion of development in Naperville through the mid-20th century, the East Highlands included.
Burke and her fellow Naperville Preservation members regard the East Highlands as a turning point in the city’s history. So when Simon saw some of the neighborhood’s original homes coming down, the organization decided some safeguarding, if in memory only, needed to happen.
In summer 2022, Naperville Preservation hired Chicago-based architecture firm Preservation Futures to study the East Highlands’ remaining original structures. The result was a 500-plus page booklet covering the neighborhood’s history and features.
In all, Preservation Futures recorded details of 453 homesites. Of those, the firm determined 223 were new construction. As for architectural style, most of the sites surveyed were either identified as “split-level” or “ranch.”
Preservation Futures repeated the process in River Haven Estates, another Moser development with a healthy stock of midcentury modern houses.
Between January and March, the firm surveyed 96 sites and found only a small portion of Riven Haven has given way to new development.
Burke said River Haven might have fared better than the East Highlands because the houses there “are more interesting.”
For example, River Haven has a few houses constructed by well-known builder, Don Tosi, who became famous for his custom homes with a contemporary flair and trademark orange front doors.
“There’s more uniqueness,” Burke said.
Individuality aside, Naperville Preservation wants to see both River Haven and the East Highlands stand the test of time as much as possible.
Burke has floated the idea of offering incentives to owners of older homes to stop them from being torn down, similar to a program the village of Hinsdale put in place last year. But she says more groundwork needs to be done before incentives are a feasible option in Naperville.
“I think if we put together an ordinance today, I don’t think it would have enough traction,” she said. “I think we have to continue to work really hard at raising awareness.
“That means that people’s mindsets have to shift a little bit to beginning to think about things kind of differently. And I’m not saying that in a negative way. … But you have to work through that in order to find a common understanding of the importance of certain levels of historic preservation.”
