Oak Park
The suburbs of big cities can be pretty boring, but Oak Park is a suburb of Chicago that is definitely worth a visit. The expansion of any city is shaped by transport links, and Oak Park’s origins lie in the construction of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad. The suburb of Cicero sprang up beside the railroad line, and it became a popular place to resettle after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In the north west of Cicero, away from the original railroad line, many fine large houses were built including the 1889 home of an up and coming architect called Frank Lloyd Wright. He lived in the house until 1909 and he designed many other buildings in the area. In 1902 the residents decided that they no longer wanted to be part of Cicero and voted in a referendum to set up the Village of Oak Park. In Oak Park, Lloyd Wright Wright developed and perfected his classic Prairie Style architecture, low buildings with open spaces and an emphasis on interior light. There are twenty five of his buildings in the area. Oak Park’s other major claim to fame is that it is the place where Ernest Hemingway was born and brought up.
Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio
Many of the homes in Oak Park remain private and they can only be viewed from the road. An exception to this is the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio, where he lived from 1889 to 1909. The house is open for guided tours and it is also the starting point for an audio walking tour that takes you past several other Lloyd Wright designed houses in the locality. Lloyd Wright married Catherine Tobin in 1889 and shortly afterwards he began the construction of their home. A room on the upper floor was his original design studio until in 1898 he added a studio annex to the house.
Nathan G Moore House
In 1895 Nathan Moore asked Lloyd Wright to design a large house in the English Tudor style. The result was a house very different from the Prairie Style that he developed later, it was a house with high gables, half timbering and massive chimneys. The house burned down on Christmas Day 1922 so Moore went back to Lloyd Wright to get it rebuilt. The house was rebuilt in 1923 to a design similar to the original but with even higher gables. The owners of this house do run tours but at the time of writing they were suspended due to illness.
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Hemingway Birthplace, 339 N Oak Park Avenue
Ernest and Carolyne Hall built this Queen Anne style house in 1890 as their retirement home. After Carolyne died, Ernest’s daughter Grace and her husband Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway moved in with him. On July 21, 1899 Grace gave birth in the house to their second child, a boy that they named Ernest after his grandfather. The young Ernest called his grandfather Abba. Also living in the house was his uncle, Benjamin Tyley Hancock, who impressed Ernest with stories of his extensive travels. When Ernest was five, Abba died and soon after the family moved to a Prairie-style house elsewhere in Oak Park. The house in North Oak Park Avenue was sold. Ernest Hemingway grew up to become a famous author and journalist but it was not until more than three decades after his death that efforts began to preserve his birthplace. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park acquired the house in 1992. It had been much changed by subsequent owners, but the foundation set about the task of returning the house to the way it would have looked when Ernest lived there. The work took 9 years to complete but the Hemingway Birthplace is now open for tours.
Arthur B Heurtley House
The house that Lloyd Wright designed for banker Arthur B. Heurtley in 1902 is considered to be one of the earliest examples of the full Prairie Style architecture. Gone are the high gables seen on the Nathan G Moore House and instead the house has low profile and plenty of windows to provide interior light. Unusually, the living and dining areas of the house are on the upper floor.
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Unity Temple, 875 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL, USA
After the Unity Temple burned down, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1905 to design a replacement. Not only was Lloyd Wright a local man, but he came from a family of Unitarians. It was Lloyd Wright’s first public commission and the result was an architectural masterpiece. The reinforced concrete building that he designed is considered to be one of the first truly modern buildings in the world. It is the the last surviving public building from his Prairie period and was protected as a US National Historic Landmark in 1971. The temple is still used by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation.
© Mike Elsden 1981 - 2025
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