The Big Move

The other day we talked about Mr. Bolos's daily commute from the station in Wheaton to the Indian Hill station near the school.  Some of the differences he notices are glaring because he travels through so many different communities in order to get to work.  In some ways, I made the same change of location only 3 years ago.  My dad commutes into the city to work.  He rode the Milwaukee district west line, and now rides the Milwaukee district north line, which is similar to Mr. Bolos's commute.

Right before freshman year, I lived in Bloomingdale, which is in Dupage County (area code 60108).  For your information, Bloomingdale is a sizeable town, with about 22000 residents.  I went to church there, elementary school there, etc.  I was very familiar with the area.  When we moved to Wilmette, area code 60091, there were many stark contrasts in how the town was constructed.  My first thoughts were that Bloomingdale was much more spread out than Wilmette or Winnetka.  There, large groups of homes were built together, usually by a single housing contractor.  These subdivisions were separated by geographical barriers, such as a golf course, a four lane road, a shopping center, or a school.  There was also more yard space, which in conjunction with these other factors, makes Bloomingdale more spread out than Wilmette or Winnetka.

Some other differences are that Bloomingdale has more gas stations, more fast food restaurants, more large chain stores, and more strip malls.  There is also a large shopping mall in Bloomingdale, called Stratford Square Mall.  It is a very large mall by any standard, and I still could get lost there (but hey, I'm a male).  It also has less tall trees, and the ones that are tall are distanced more.  Since buildings and attractions are farther apart, most people don't walk or ride their bikes places.  There are more obese people there too.

It is obvious that Bloomingdale is a newer suburb, and was structured in an area where land was plentiful and flat, while Wilmette and Winnetka seem to have been built in an area where they had to cut down more trees for buildings and land was limited on two sides by Chicago and Lake Michigan.  Bloomingdale  has more town homes and apartment style living than Wilmette or Winnetka, but the majority of what I saw were single, unattached houses.  In the subdivision where I lived, there were four groups of living arrangements with a club house in the middle, where there are swimming pools, a workout room, and banquet halls.  Single homes, luxury homes, townhomes, and luxury townhomes, which were pretty much houses, but sort of small, and attached to three others.  They had two car garages and were relatively new.

Since Bloomingdale is a more recent suburb of Chicago, it has attracted greater diversity of cultures and races.  There are large populations of Italian, Indian, Irish, and Polish people.  Here, there are more Jewish people than I have ever met in one place.

There are more differences that I notice, but I think this post is long enough now.  Even though there are these differences, I would argue that Bloomingdale is still more similar to the North Shore than Belmont, where the truck logistic center is, or most of the other stops along Mr. Bolos's route.  It is clean, the sky is still blue, and the people are mostly middle class because of their education and job opportunities.  Do you think that my experience was totally different from yours if you lived on the North Shore for a longer time than I?  Have you lived anywhere else?  How was that different?  What can we learn from studying these different suburban communities?