Houses are bigger, people are the same

In 1954, we were house-hunting. I was pregnant with our fourth child in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago. My husband was a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. The Chicago and North Western station was at ground level in the Daily News building on West Madison Street.

Real estate was expensive in Chicago, and so it made a lot of sense for us to follow the North Western tracks to a house we could afford and from which my husband could easily commute.

When we saw a newspaper ad for three-bedroom ranches in a subdivision called Virginia Terrace in Arlington Heights, we bundled into our little blue Plymouth and went to inspect the model house that was pictured.

I had wearied of house-hunting by this time so I took one look, sat down in a folding chair in front of a rearview picture window and announced, "I am going no farther." We bought the faintly Usonian ranch on Oakton Street that day.

We bought into a wonderful life, what our children remember as a "golden childhood" of young families, multiple playmates, large lots with no fences and deep parkways, great freedom of movement.

Sixty years later we live in the center of town in a relatively large bungalow with a small lot and a narrow parkway. And my husband enjoys an occasional bike ride up Dunton and across Oakton to check out Virginia Terrace.

He reports that, with the exception of a few houses on Oakton that haven't changed that much, Virginia Terrace is almost unrecognizable. Where once there were small ranches on large lots, now there are large, sometimes very large, homes on what don't appear to be such large lots any more. "It's all very handsome, but it is not the same," he says.

But then Arlington Heights is not the country village of perhaps 10,000 souls surrounded by truck gardens that greeted us in 1954.

Then most of the houses in town were what might be called "carpenter gothic." Most of the men in town were capable carpenters, and many of them had built their own homes. Their gabled houses looked very plain alongside the few Queen Anne houses scattered around the village built by successful merchants.

Gradually, the people who had happily moved into small ranches when we did needed more room for growing families. Soon there were two-story houses where once there had been single story. New houses where small houses had been torn down.

Town historian Margot Stimely, in a piece for Pioneer Press in 1998, explained that Arlington Heights had no space for the large houses residents needed - or desired. The village stretched from the Jane Addams Tollway on the south to Lake County on the north. Palatine was growing on the west, Mount Prospect on the east. But it was all built up.

"Rather than moving from their homes into new communities, residents started adding rooms, wings, upper levels, and redoing dated kitchens and bathrooms." Stimely lists some of the houses and some of their features.

Coincidentally, she cites the "handsome leaded windows" in the front bow of our house.

She doesn't mention how much it cost to fix them when one of the kids put some solid object, say a book, through the etched glass.