The Oswego Village Board is eyeing a concept plan for a residential and commercial development on the site of the old Oswego Drag Raceway.
The Raceway, which operated from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, featured a quarter-mile track at the Wally Smith farm, a mile-and-a-half west of town on Route 34 that was drawing three times the village’s total population for races during its heyday, local historians have said.
The Little White School Museum in Oswego in 2024 featured an exhibit honoring the Raceway, well-known throughout the Chicago area for radio ads featuring announcer Jan Gabriel shouting “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” before listing which drag racers and dragsters would appear during that weekend’s races.
D.R. Horton, Inc. Midwest is proposing to build Parksmith Run, consisting of 210 single-family homes and 76 townhome units, on the 107-acre property that once held the Raceway north of Route 34 and west of the Orchard Woods development along Orchard Road.
No formal vote has been taken by the Oswego Village Board on the proposal.
“This site as the former raceway has a long history in Oswego,” D.R. Horton Land Acquisition Project Manager Chris Funkhouser told village trustees recently.
A nursery subsequently used the site to grow tree stock but now the site has been vacant for years, officials said.
The village originally approved the annexation agreement for the Parksmith Run development in 2007. That proposal featured 154 single-family homes and 88 townhomes, plus a 5-acre commercial area and a 7-acre park site.
However, the original developer did not start construction of the project, officials said.
D.R. Horton, as contract purchaser for the property, is looking to revise the almost 20-year-old plan to be more consistent with current market trends.
The home builder has completed residential developments throughout the Midwest including in Oswego, Aurora and Montgomery, Funkhouser said.
The proposed development is within the Oswegoland Park District and Yorkville School District 115, officials said.
The Oswego Planning and Zoning Commission in a 4-3 vote recently recommended approval of the concept plan with the direction that the minimum lot width be increased from 65 feet to 70 feet to reduce density, Oswego Development Services Director Rod Zenner said.
Some commission members were concerned with the road connections to existing road stubs in the unincorporated Lynnwood subdivision to the west, while other commission members favored the road connections as proposed, Zenner said.
The three commission members who voted against recommending the project had opinions that lots should be removed from around the park site to make it larger, that the lot sizes should be at least 10,000 square feet and that the cross-access to neighboring subdivisions be removed.
Along with single-family homes, the new concept plan also proposes 76 two-story townhomes located towards the southern portion of the property behind proposed commercial development along Route 34. The revised concept plan decreases the number of townhomes by 12 units from the original 2007 plan, village officials said.
Staff and the majority of the village’s planning group are supportive of the proposed road connections to the Lynnwood subdivision to the west, village officials said.
“It is best practice to provide cross-access between subdivisions,” village officials said.
The revised plan increases future commercial space from 5.14 acres to 7.5 acres along Route 34 when compared to the proposal from 2007. The new concept plan also proposes a decrease in the park site from 7 acres to 4.9 acres compared to the previous plan.
“When you look at the density, the comprehensive plan calls for two to three units per acre. We are currently at 2.66 units per acre,” Funkhouser said.
The majority of single-family home lots would have a minimum width of 65 feet and a typical depth of 125 feet for a total square footage of 8,125 square feet, officials said.
“This is what we see as what a lot of buyers want,” Funkhouser said.
The remaining 44 lots for single-family homes would have a lot width of 80 feet with a depth of 125 feet for a total square footage of 10,000 square feet, according to officials.
Increasing the minimum lot width to 70 feet as proposed by the Planning and Zoning Commission would result in a reduction of about six single-family lots and an overall density of 2.60 units per acre, village officials said.
Oswego Village President Ryan Kauffman proposed that idea to the developer. Funkhouser said the reduction could be in the range of 10 to 12 lots.
“We would definitely consider that if that’s the direction we have been asked to look at. We would look to see what it does to the site,” Funkhouser said of increasing the minimum lot width.
“That was the big takeaway I took from Planning and Zoning. If it only removes 12 lots, in my mind, it seems like a direction to pursue,” Kauffman said.
Kauffman said he has received feedback from residents interested in making some historical reference to the Raceway days in Oswego within the development, such as naming some of the streets to honor the racing history of the site.
The inquiry was about somehow preserving the glory days of the drag strip, Kauffman said.
According to a news release from the Little White School Museum during its 2024 exhibit, “at a time when Oswego’s population was around 1,200 residents, the drag raceway regularly drew some 4,000 spectators each Sunday to see such well-known drag racers as Arnie ‘The Farmer’ Beswick and Art Arfons and such famed dragsters as Arfons’ jet-powered Green Monster, not to mention well-known local racers including Al Thompson from Aurora’s Al’s Speed Shop and Oswego’s own Bob Mead.”
Kauffman said people are interested in knowing whether the developer would be interested in naming the streets after cars and car racers from those days.
“That is definitely something we would be looking to do,” Funkhouser said.
Another idea is to host a closing ceremony at the site in honor of Oswego’s drag strip days.
“If this does move forward, this would allow for some form of closure for drag strip fans,” Kauffman said. “Maybe they could … have a celebration one last time.”
Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
