Lake Forest Heights: A Development 50 Years in the Making

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Lake Forest Heights: A Development 50 Years in the Making

Aerial view of the proposed subdivision looking northeast, c. 1930. Streets are platted out and marked.

Survey done for American Realty Co. by City of Lake Forest Engineer Neil N. Campbell, dated June 11, 1924.

Survey done for American Realty Co. by City of Lake Forest Engineer Neil N. Campbell, dated June 11, 1924.

1946

1946

1974

1974

1993

1993

Lake Forest Heights, between Everett and Old Elm roads west of the Skokie Highway, has spanned the years of subdivision growth in Lake Forest. The development was originally planned by the American Realty Company in 1924, who bought the property from the Wheeler and Yore families for $130,000.Lake Forest added the land to its city limits in 1926. A selling point of the subdivision was its proximity to the commuter railway; the Old Elm station for the North Shore Line’s Skokie Valley Route is marked in the above photo at right.As the plats and aerial photos below reveal, it was over 60 years before many homes were built, a casualty of the slump in home construction during the 1930s and 1940s.
Everett Road runs horizontally across the top of the images, and Old Elm Road across the bottom. The diagonal cutting through at right is the Skokie Highway; at center is Ridge Road.
Outlines of the original surveyed development are visible from the tree lines, but no homes had been built.
The main roads of the neighborhood – Everett and Ridge – have seen some building activity, but the interior remains undeveloped.
Developers pounced on this pre-platted land in the 1980s, but an issue arose – lot sizes remained at the standard half-acre envisioned in the 1920s, but area demand called for much larger houses. This prompted Lake Forest to come up with a mathematical formula limiting house size on a given lot.