Ridgeland-Oak Park Historic District

Oak Park's Ridgeland district covers 539 acres west of Chicago, on a flat glacial plain nine miles from Lake Michigan. Its 1,653 buildings, mostly houses, were built between the 1870s and 1920s after artesian wells, railroads and Chicago's growth made the area a major residential suburb. Wood-frame Gothic Revival, Italianate and Queen Anne houses from the nineteenth century give way to simpler, boxier early twentieth-century designs, a change the district shows clearly. The Farson House by Maher, the largest and costliest residence, helped set that direction. Architect Eben E. Roberts promoted stucco, and developers built rows of similar stucco houses and bungalows that gave streets a new unity. Wide parkway lawns and a grid of streets shape the setting, and brick apartment buildings of two to four stories line the busier streets around quiet single-family areas. Churches and commercial buildings range from Romanesque to Prairie School. A 2002 amendment later corrected the counts to 1,558 contributing and 147 noncontributing buildings.