Burb District Question (Chicago, Naperville, Evanston: neighborhoods, construction, high schools)

[JJski]

Just a fairly simple question:

In La Grange our Downtown is broken up into districts like this:
Downtown: Central Business District/West End/South End/Industrial Corridor

Are others like this? Guessing bigger ones are yes (maybe formal or informal) so curious what they are for:

Oak Park?

Naperville?

Evanston?

Thanks.

[damba]

Originally Posted by JJski

Just a fairly simple question:

In La Grange our Downtown is broken up into districts like this:
Downtown: Central Business District/West End/South End/Industrial Corridor

Are others like this? Guessing bigger ones are yes (maybe formal or informal) so curious what they are for:

Oak Park?

Naperville?

Evanston?

Thanks.

Some of them may be related to zoning. Google should be able to tell you this pretty quickly once you hop on the various city/suburb sites. Others may be simply non-governmental designations, used to some degree historically to identify separate parts of the downtown or specific neighborhoods. I believe in Evanston they do it to provide developmental designations too. YMMV.

[Kmanshouse]

Other than downtown, Naperville is simply broken up by subdivisions, not districts.

The whole town is a composition of subdivisions so when you tell someone what part of town you live in, you just name the subdivision. But because there are so many of them, most of us have only heard of 2/3 of them at most, so sometimes you to clarify by "region" like South Naperville, or "By 59 and Diehl" etc.

[ToriaT]

We don't have districts in Wheaton. We have a central business district akin to downtown LaGrange that is divided by "north of the tracks" and "south of the tracks. We also have shopping areas at either end of town, in the Danada area in south Wheaton, and the Geneva Road corridor in North Wheaton. Wheaton is all one town but it has two separate high schools north and south. The dividing line is Roosevelt Road. Everyone goes to downtown Wheaton but shopping you go north or south depending on where you live. Whole Foods is in South Wheaton so everyone goes down there if they want to shop at Whole Foods.

I know in Berwyn they have the "veltway" which is Roosevelt Rd corridor, Cermak Road area in central Berwyn, harlem Ave by Cermak plaza, the Depot district, and the Ogden Avenue corridor. Its nothing formal in most cases its just the way businesses and stores are set up.

[chet everett]

Originally Posted by ToriaT

We don't have districts in Wheaton. We have a central business district akin to downtown LaGrange that is divided by "north of the tracks" and "south of the tracks. We also have shopping areas at either end of town, in the Danada area in south Wheaton, and the Geneva Road corridor in North Wheaton. Wheaton is all one town but it has two separate high schools north and south. The dividing line is Roosevelt Road. Everyone goes to downtown Wheaton but shopping you go north or south depending on where you live. Whole Foods is in South Wheaton so everyone goes down there if they want to shop at Whole Foods.

I know in Berwyn they have the "veltway" which is Roosevelt Rd corridor, Cermak Road area in central Berwyn, harlem Ave by Cermak plaza, the Depot district, and the Ogden Avenue corridor. Its nothing formal in most cases its just the way businesses and stores are set up.

Illinois has never been known as the kind of State that did much to actually "block" development in the ways that are common in places like California. That means that when any developer proposes either residential or commercial construction for either the "core" of town or things that are more oriented toward the "driveable sections" of a town the concerns really come down to pretty issues of parking / safe egress.

For the most part this is better situation than the overly restrictive zoning that resulted in decades of very "sprawl oriented" housing in California that was far removed from either retail or office uses. Of course now that there are efforts to retro-fit "transit oriented development" and/or "mixed uses" that make it easy to walk from residential areas and do some shopping or get to work that forces a MASSIVE re-thinking of pretty much every aspect of the existing land use.

In contrast many towns throughout the Chicago region are able to leverage their connections to commuter trains and simply encourage appropriate levels of higher density residential and/or retail / office development. These towns still have PLENTY of retail along the various arterial roads which is still a big part of the "car centric" commerce. It is interesting to see how some towns have multiple locations of various banks, restaurants, coffee spots that have rather different "character" depending on whether they are set up mostly to serve walk-by or drive-to customers. From Starbuck and Chase Bank to locally owned dry cleaners and UPS stores there are great examples of how locations specific uses both challenge the business providers and result in a healthy mix of services for both the "car-centric" and more walking / transit loving residents of towns throughout the region...