Synopses & Reviews
In the 1830s, settlers established a community of farms along the Des Plaines River, initially naming the town Rand for the influential pioneer Socrates Rand. In the 1850s, the Chicago and North Western Railway ran tracks from Chicago to Cary, Illinois, building a station at the Des Plaines River to provide water for steam engines. The station was named Des Plaines, and the community incorporated as Des Plaines in 1869. In addition to providing the community's name, the railroad brought prosperity. Visitors from Chicago flocked to Des Plaines to fish and swim in the river. Businesses sprang up to cater to the tourists and new residents, campers congregated at the Methodist campgrounds, and bands played at Northwestern Park. In turn, farms supplied Chicago with produce and flowers. Des Plaines was nicknamed the "City of Roses" when area greenhouses produced more than one million of the flowers annually. After World War II, houses sprouted in place of farms, and the population burgeoned, turning Des Plaines into the modern suburb it is today.
Synopsis
A decade after she published Images of America: Lincoln Park, Chicago, Lincoln Park native and current resident Melanie Ann Apel is back with another look of this gem of a neighborhood. Lincoln Park Revisited takes the reader on another tour of the neighborhood, peering into its schools and workplaces, visiting its vast park, also called Lincoln Park, complete with a zoo, conservatory, gardens, farm, and beaches, pondering the difference between a Lincoln Park winter and a Lincoln Park summer. It is a fresh look into the past and a memory book of the present, to be preserved for future generations. As the bustling neighborhood with the hometown feel continues to grow and change, this new collection of more than 200 historical and modern-day photographs serves as a much-awaited companion piece to Lincoln Park, Chicago.
About the Author
Melanie Ann Apel, a Lincoln Park original, is raising her own children in the neighborhood that her family has called home for the past half century. Walking to the same grocery store, attending the same grade school, playing on the same playground, and visiting the same zoo, Melanie's children share another generation in the warmth of Lincoln Park.