Why do some communities have straight streets and others have curving streets, and even different kinds of curving streets? It depends on when the community was laid out. Community street patterns have evolved through four phases:
· Organic
· Grid
· Picturesque landscape
· 20th century curvilinear or warped grid
· Loops and lollipops
I will explain and illustrate.
Organic
For much of human history towns grew organically. As settlements became villages, streets “going this way or that” were added incrementally as needed. Paths turned into streets, then clusters of buildings were erected along the irregularly located streets, and the rest of the town or city grew around them. Central London and Boston have elements of organic street layout.
The best (and really only) example of organic street layout in the towns along the Q is central Downers Grove. Having initially grown as an informal settlement along the Southwest Trail (long before the “Q” railroad tracks arrived), Downers Grove still contains a few square blocks of organic street pattern, particularly along Curtiss Street. Subsequent population growth and incorporation as a municipality resulted in imposition of a gridded street pattern through the early 20th century.
Grid
The grid, namely a regularized pattern of streets meeting at right angles, characterized American cities, rural communities and suburbs right up until World War II. Towns along the Q are no exception. Grided street pattern is nearly as old as civilization itself, at least dating back to 2,000 bce in Pakistan. The pattern was legitimatized and popularized by the Hippodamus, a follower of Pythagoras (think Pythagorean theorem) in the rebuilding of the Greek city of Miletus in about 400 bce. William Penn established the first major rectangular checkerboard urban street pattern in North America with the platting of Philadelphia in 1680.
There were rational and practical reasons for widespread use of the grid system. It made it easy to lay out towns in advance of settlement. Lots could be easily and conveniently surveyed and numbered for sale, ultimately resulting in the “standard” urban lot size of 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep. Legal disputes over lot boundaries were minimized. The system maximized the number of houses that could be located on a given street. Philosophically speaking, use of the grid reflected the order, regularity, balance and predictability most admired by the rationalists of the early 19th century, described by one analyst as the “triumph of reason over the wanton riot of nature."
The platting of Chicago in 1830 brought the grid to the shore of Lake Michigan, and that grid spread westward through most of the towns along the Q as new communities were planted along the railroad, and populations grew. Berwyn and Cicero represent the logical extension of the Chicago grid.
Picturesque Landscapes
Mid-19th century objection to imposing order on nature was reflected in the work of landscape architects, Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted being among the most notable. Parks were looked upon as a refuge from the anti-natural imposition of human activity on natural settings. At that time, many upscale suburban residential communities were conceived as retreats from the evils of the city, imposition of order upon nature being one of them.
So it was that the developers of Riverside called upon Olmsted, who had recently laid out Central Park in New York, to design a street layout harmonious with the natural environment rather than destroying it with the imposition of the urban gridded street pattern.
Among the Towns along the Q, Riverside, Clarendon Hills, and (to a lesser extent) Hinsdale, incorporated the gently curving street patterns. Riverside does have pockets of grid street pattern, in places where the 1868 era Riverside Improvement Company was not able to acquire the land. Clarendon Hills was laid out with gently curving streets, but the northwest quadrant was replatted in the 1920s with a warped grid pattern.
Hinsdale’s original 1866 plat (two years after the CB&Q line was opened) plat involved gridded streets, but developer William Robbins employed landscape architect H.W.S. Cleveland to layout parklike streets in the appropriately named Park Addition to Hinsdale. In the 1920s, the George W. Maher designed Hinsdale’s Woodlands Addition incorporated gently curving parklike streets. Likewise Downers Grove’s Denburn Woods incorporates a parklike picturesque landscape aspect.
Curvilinear and Warped Grid
By the 1920s, when automobiles had become commonplace in the suburbs, new street patterns were introduced with the purpose of separating pedestrians from fast traffic, and to a distinguish between arterial streets and local streets. Though nearly all new 1920s subdivisions along the Q were laid out with gridded streets, theorists were introducing prototype local street layouts that encouraged cautious driving and discouraged use of local streets for all but local access.
The traditional grid was modified to introduce gentle curves limiting motorists forward sight-lines, with irregular intersections compelling motorists to watch for cross-traffic, and indirect street access to discourage non-local motorists from “cutting-through” the neighborhoods.
Federal Housing Administration guidelines (that ultimately became requirements) enacted in the late 1930s, mandated this type of street layout for further suburban development, ending the use of the straight grid for future subdivisions.
Loops and Lollipops
In a further effort to minimize non-local automobile traffic, maximize pedestrian safety, and engender a generalized sense of safety and security, street layout practice has evolved to the “loops and lollipops” format featuring streets looping through residential neighborhoods, generally with fewer connections to the surrounding arterial street network. “Lollipops” are cul-de-sacs, namely dead-end spurs off the looping streets with round auto turnarounds at the ends giving them a lollipop shape, and have the effect of excluding all but local automobile travel. The street layout has proved popular with suburbanites in bringing about both a real and perceived sense of privacy, safety and serenity as well as a heightened sense of neighborhood sociability. Oak Brook, depicted here, hosts the most distinctively developed loops and lollipops street pattern.
Evolution
Everything in life evolves to adapt to ever changing conditions. Towns along the Q street patterns have evolved through the four phases more or less (with the exception of the picturesque suburbs layout) on a time-continuum in direct relation to the distance from the train stations. We can only imagine what street layouts will characterize communities in the future.