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(0)Douglas Deuchler
2) Berwyn
Eight miles west of downtown Chicago sits a suburb with a rich, vibrant history. Berwyn began in the 19th century as two separate communities with vast stretches of marshland and farmland between. By the early 1900s, this booming municipality successfully kept industry at bay while remaining a strictly residential development. As thousands of bungalows were constructed in the 1920s, the "City of Homes," as it was known, became the fastest-growing
...3) Maywood
The character of this singular suburb is preserved and celebrated in Images of America: Maywood. A must-have for fans of Illinois history.
Ten miles west of Chicago on the west bank of the Des Plaines River sits Maywood, a village that was founded in 1869 by seven New England businessmen who established the Maywood Land Company. This prairie community, carefully laid out along the railroad, experienced a population
...Strategically located seven miles west of Chicago's Loop, multifaceted Cicero is one of the oldest and largest municipalities in Illinois. In the late 19th century, this unique industrial suburb developed as an ethnic patchwork of self-sufficient immigrant neighborhoods. Since the Roaring Twenties, when mobster kingpin Al Capone set up shop there, the town has often been characterized by corruption and controversy. Yet the Cicero story continues
...Although it was first settled in the 1830s, Oak Park did not become an independent municipality until it split from Cicero Township in 1902. No longer a rustic small town, the village soon became a population magnet, attracting ever-larger numbers of prosperous, progressive people to settle in what many soon referred to as "the finest of the streetcar suburbs."Coincidentally, use of the penny picture postcard had approached a national mania during
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