Park Forest: Looking in on "Utopia"

About a week or so ago I went to Park Forest, Illinois for a screening of Phil Rockrohr’s documentary, “Revisiting Utopia” last week. It’s about Park Forest, the suburb I wished I grew up in. I grew up in Country Club Hills: yeah, the name was comically aspirational. There were no Country Clubs in CCH — in fact, I doubt if a lot of the families I grew up with even played golf. The closest we came was my brother being a caddy at Ravisloe Country Club — but that was in nearby Homewood. In fact there were country clubs in just about every suburb in Rich Township *except* Country Club Hills. 

Oh, and Park Forest. Park Forest didn’t have a country club, but I didn’t need one. As Rockrohr pointed out during the post-screening Q&A,  CCH was trying to follow in the footsteps of Park Forest, but I have to agree with him… nah. CCH’s developers JE Merrion and Son didn’t put as much deep planning and investment into it. Park Forest had so many things CCH didn’t have: A big public swimming pool. A well-stocked library in a cool-looking mid century building. That shopping center, anchored on one end by the high end Marshall Field's,  the lower end Goldblatt’s, and Sears — that had everything Field's and Goldblatt’s wouldn’t have: an auto shop, ticketron, garden supplies, power tools, and that whole downstairs at Christmastime that turned into Santa’s toy department. In between all of those was a movie theater, a Kresge (the precursor to Kmart — ironically right across the sidewalk from the Field’s), a record store, some hip clothing shops. A stone’s throw away was a grocery store. Playgrounds and parks filled in the blanks throughout the village, and it was surrounded  by county forests with trails, picnic areas, and other escapes from the metropolis where many of its residents found employment. But the IC train (now the Metra) would drop you smack dab in the middle of the Chicago Loop so you could get to work. 

As described in William Whyte’s seminal sociological study of postwar corporate life, The Organization Man, Park Forest was planned to be that way. Different from Levittown (whose developers insisted on a “white” community, and had the beginnings of HOA-style rules to enforce consistency), or the earlier New Deal Greenbelt towns (Greenbelt MD, Greendale WI), Park Forest was built for  not just soldiers returning home from war, but the middle class family ready to belong to a community. There was (and still is) a variety of housing stock — from rows of townhouses for rent for families just starting out, to midcentury ranch and split levels with yards just big enough to have the neighbors over for a cookout. Neighborhood schools peeked out around corners, and churches (including synagogues) featured similar contemporary architecture. But as Rochrohr's film points out, Whyte kind of missed the point of Park Forest. While Whyte uses Park Forest as an example of the forced conformity that corporate life demands, "Revisiting Utopia"  documents the "managed integration" that supported community and simultaneously encouraged diversity. 

The film goes deep into how Park Forest's early leadership used several strategies to achieve what today would be termed “social engineering: it shows how ParkForest’s developers worked with real estate agents to steer buyers into integrated neighborhoods to keep them from  being too white or too black — a reverse redlining, if you will. It appears to have worked — if only for a brief time as described by many of Rockrohr’s interviewees. Many described it as a Utopia — quickly adding that they knew it wasn’t truly Utopia, but came about as close as anybody’s going to get. Some further described a certain culture shock upon moving out and realizing the rest of the world wasn’t like this: there was still blatant racism, antisemitism, and a general suspicion of anybody “different.” To be sure, those elements existed within Park Forest as well. Several interviewees described acts of racism directed at them — including bullying, use of the N word, and numerous microaggressions.  But it seemed to be kept under wraps. And Rockrohr, who is white, wondered if the surface look of the Park Forest “Utopia” he grew up in was for real, and he wisely sought out the village’s people of color to tell their stories and share their perspective. 

As I drove past my old house in CCH on my way to the PF theater (Freedom Hall) for the screening, I had already realized what Rockrohr said out loud: boy, CCH tried. 

Like PF, the streets weren’t an urban grid. They were winding streets that steered you either to the schools, libraries or terminated in cul-de-sacs designed to encouraged families to be true neighbors. Before moving there, my family lived in one of the Park Forest starter apartments, and when they were ready to buy (and I came along), CCH was more in their price range, and CCH had larger yards, something my family wanted.  Our family though, still did a lot of Park Forest: their 4th of July Fireworks were better, hanging out at the Plaza (malls hadn’t been built yet) was something to do,  and I would always get permission to just wander around that library while the rest of the family did grownup stuff.  Like CCH, Park Forest’s teenagers were split between two high schools. In CCH, that was Rich Central and Hillcrest. In Park Forest, it was Rich Central and Rich East. As Rockrohr pointed out, the vast majority of Park Foresters went to Rich East, but Rich Central had its own little diaspora going. 

The Lagoon

When it was being built in 1960, Rich Central was heralded by education journals as “an image of the future in Olympia Fields IL” and the Ford foundation called it one of the “significant schools of the future” and looked like it: designed by local midcentury modern architect John McPherson, it featured low slung lines, expansive use of glass, and integration with the environment. It has a lagoon out front, for crying’ out loud, which fed many local legends about some jeep that had been parked on it during the winter. The interior included classrooms (duh of course), cafeteria that doubled as a multipurpose gathering space, a “little” theater which was the right size to perform drama/comedy from Tennessee Williams to Ferber/Kaufman. Larger productions were held in the gym, which could also be modified to accommodate  larger broadway-style musical productions. Rich Central’s music department’s students practiced in state of the art music rooms, biology students passed beautiful indoor planters between classes. Students could choose to attend the ALPS (Alternative Process Learning School) program at Rich East (an experimental sub-school that had students designing their own curriculum, doing their research, and presenting their findings — think Montessori crossed with the International Baccalaureate program). Advanced placement classes were taken for granted, as were the several (French, Spanish, German and Latin) foreign language offerings. I had absolutely no clue at the time just how well-thought out everything about Rich Central was, nor did I realize how perfectly this school accommodated the diversity that about 30% of Park Forest’s helped feed.  

And like Park Forest, Rich Central drew students from a myriad of populations: from the working class Matteson/CCH families, to the relatively rich kids from Olympia Fields, to the lower income East Chicago Heights families, and then the mix from Park Forest. I had classes with white, black, asian and hispanic students. Our families went to churches, synagogues, mosques, meeting houses to worship. And like many of the interviewees in the documentary noted about Park Forest, none of this seemed unique at the time. Oh, there had been issues (those late 60s/early 70s race riots at RC are still talked about), but still. All the Rich Township high schools were like this. 

I had tight friends in CCH, and it wasn’t a bad place to grow up. In fact, it was great. But it wasn’t Park Forest. I met the majority of my friends at Rich Central, and of those, the majority of them lived in Park Forest, where my childhood wishes of moving back there were reawakened. I never really was jealous of the Olympia Fields rich kids outside of their money. As children of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, they were expected to follow their parents’s path to college. They were generally good-looking and/or charming, and failing either, still at the top of the social ladder by virtue of their wealth. They were the popular crowd… but the Park Forest kids were cool. And that was the source of my envy:  the Park Foresters got to grow up with all that stuff I coveted. I didn’t want my own swimming pool: I wanted a place with a swimming pool where there would be a pile of my friends. I wanted a bigass library. I wanted a shopping center/movie theater/ restaurant hangout within bicycling distance, not just the Ben Franklin with a natural foods store-cum-head-shop that was tucked into the single strip mall next to the grocery store in CCH. 

And I had no idea then, or even until after Rockrohr’s documentary, that it was also intentionally built to be (in current nomenclature) diverse. “Revisiting Utopia” shows chief designer Phillip  Klutznik, a Jewish man who had experienced antisemitism and wanted to build what Rockrohr termed “Utopia” along with architect Nathan Manilow. Together they consciously developed a range of housing stock to attract a range of people. That shopping center served the needs of high end people who wanted the level of fashion Field's provided, as well as the discounted ready-to-wear affordability Goldblatt’s offered, to the practical do-it-yourself one stop Sears could fulfill. The village stood between Olympia Fields and Flossmoor with their attorneys, doctors and other postgraduate professionals, and Chicago Heights’ last-stop-before-Indiana and ended up being a safe place to mix. "Revisiting Utopia” points out some eye opening methods of maintaining that mix, including actively tracking Black families’ housing locations to ensure “integration maintenance” driven by “affirmative marketing.”  All of this documented in the archives of the Park Forest Historical Society, where Rockrohr doubtless spent many hours unearthing this fascinating story of a unique place and time where for one brief shining post-Kennedy moment, Utopia actually came close. 

That lovely midcentury mod clock

“Revisiting Utopia” is being screened in various midwestern forums, but it was interesting to actually watch it in Park Forest, where the audience was generally comprised of actual former and current Park Foresters. Sure, you could tell a lot of people were expecting more of a nostalgia film: I actually had to move my seat because I didn’t want to harsh the folks behind me who talked every time a long-gone landmark such as The Clock or the Holiday Theater appeared on the screen — preventing me from hearing the narration. And during the Q&A afterwards, there were plenty of testimonials and reminiscing — and of course the requisite white lady insisting she never saw any kind of racism in the village. That of course was followed up by a lively discussion around the school integration with the Beacon Hill neighborhood of nearby Chicago Heights and related attempts to broaden the reach of the “managed integration” that wasn’t managed so well. If you get a chance to view this well-done and important film, try to attend an in-person screening: the post-viewing conversation it jump starts is just as important. And it raises good questions, mine chiefly being “Is it possible to try this again?”