Creating Chicago's North Shore

The book I read for background information on our project was Michael H. Ebner's Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History. This book focuses on the creation of Chicago's North Shore which consists of 8 communities: Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, and Lake Bluff. The book begins with a short history of the suburbs, including some reasons why people wanted to get out of the urban centers - overcrowding, dirtiness, lack of garden landscape etc.

The book focuses mainly on the impact of the railroad to the creation of these communities which were only settlements before the railroad laid tracks along Lake Michigan. The railroads made it easier for people to live outside of the city and still commute to Chicago. The book does mention that some people were opposed to these technological changes in transportation because they moved too fast, changed the landscape etc.

When skimming through this book, I was fairly interested in the topic because I thought it was interesting in finding out more about the formation of the suburbs and the impact that new transportation had on them. I used to live outside of Chicago when I was a kid, and my dad used to take the train to commute to work in the city. Chicago is a central hub for railroads and it's fairly easy to travel there by train. I have taken the train from Michigan to Chicago several times.

It was easy to get bogged down when skimming through this book by the descriptions of the different communities. Since this wasn't really relevant to our topic, I tried to stick with the sections that could be used when looking at the construction of I-496. The book doesn't discuss the construction of highways (it only goes up to the invention of the automobile) but for our project we can use the information about the impact of the railroads and the car on the creation of suburbs. The highway system relates to this idea because I-496 was probably constructed to make travelling easier and resulted in people moving out of the city because it was easier to commute.