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Lake and Marion Streets, looking west, ca. 1930 |
Downtown Oak Park, located about ten miles due west of the Loop, expanded alongside Chicago's other outlying business districts during the 1920s and 1930s. As residential development closed in the gap in the urban topography that had so long separated Oak Park from Chicago, the suburb's main retail corridor, Lake Street, expanded at a rapid pace. Soon, it was no longer the small-town "main street" it had once been. By the Second World War, stores and theaters along Lake Street catered to patrons from all across the West Side of Chicago, as well as from Oak Park and other western suburbs.
General Information
Historical Map of Downtown Oak Park, 1945 [pdf 155k]
Department Stores
Marshall Field & Co.... The Fair... The Hub... Gilmore's
Theaters
Lake... Oak Park
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Illustration: Village of Oak Park, Greater Downtown Development Master Plan (Oak Park, IL: Village of Oak Park, 2005), 33.
Page authored: 1 July 2000
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