America's Original GI Town

Although Levittown, Long Island, remains the inevitable symbol of post1945 suburbia, Lev ittown was only one of a remarkable group of largescale postwar developments that included Park Forest, Illinois (begun in 1948). This Chicago suburb achieved iconic status when William H. Whyte devoted the concluding chapters of The Organization Man (1956) to Park Forest as the perfect environment for organization men, women, and children. In 1956 Gregory C. Randall was one of those “organization children” Whyte observed in Park Forest. Now a landscape architect, he has revisited his hometown in a book most valuable for its contribution to suburban design history. If Park Forest embodied for Whyte the essence of 1950s America, Randallargues that its design in fact looked back to the communitybuilding ideals of the international Garden Cities–New Towns movement and especially to the New Deal's Greenbelt program. Park Forest's design team was headed by El bert Peets, the landscape architect who provided the plan for the third, last, and arguably the bestdesigned Greenbelt town: Greendale, Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee. Park Forest's developers had been highranking liberal housing officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Although Park Forest was very much a private, forprofit enterprise, both planners and developers wanted to create “the fourth Greenbelt town”: a relatively self contained community that would include both housing and industry. They sought not only to build affordable housing for returning veterans and their families in a desperately tight housing market but also to provide an experience of neighborhood, community, and nature that neither city nor conventional suburb could match. Park Forest began with more than 3,000 rental units planned as garden apartments grouped around landscaped courts, followed by 5,500 detached single family homes and a centrally located “shopping plaza” that became an early model for the regional malls that would eventually supplant it

Affordable housing · Archaeology · Civil engineering · Geography · Landscape architect · Landscape architecture · Plan (archaeology · Sociology · Symbol (formal · Engineering · Urbanization and City Planning