It was 1957 when a Naperville clerk purportedly cut off a budding developer with the prophetic line, "Why don't you go build your own town."

The developer - Jay Stream - did just that, carving Carol Stream out of a few hundred acres of farmland.

But Stream and his fledgling community were not alone. A handful of other building magnates followed a similar path in the post-war housing boom, fashioning Glendale Heights, Oakbrook Terrace, Woodridge and others out of little but the Illinois prairie.

After World War II, "You had a fundamental shift from railroad towns in which the train station became largely irrelevant," said Scott Goldstein, of the Metropolitan Planning Council.

The automobile took the place of the rails.

But that same catalyst for expansion now presents some of the greatest challenges to the developments it made possible, Goldstein said.

"Now you're trying to recreate that town center. It's a bit of a cycle over the past 80 or 90 years," he said.

Stream, like developer Harold Reskin who started Glendale Heights next door, purposely set out to break the commuter reliance on the rail lines.

One of his early developments in Wheaton even came complete with a new car, because he promoted the city as a "two-car town," according to Jean Moore in her history of Carol Stream, "Build Your Own Town."

With the mobility provided by the automobile, defacto town planners such as Stream saw little need for the traditional downtown, opting instead for the new version of the city center - the shopping mall. Easily within reach by automobile, the mall offered convenience that previously did not exist.

"That was what was going on at the time," Moore said.

Fast forward to the mid-1980s.

The towns that incorporated 40 years ago with 100 residents have ballooned to 20,000 or more. Cars clog local roads and the highways.

The resulting frustration, Goldstein said, has been a catalyst for a new planning direction now known as the New Urbanism.

"Virtually every town you can name, they're all talking about what they can do with their town center," Goldstein said.

In older, train-oriented towns such as Lisle and Downers Grove, that means revitalizing existing downtown retail and government centers.

But in newer suburbs, such as Woodridge and Carol Stream, it means creating a focus.

Woodridge has done that with a refurbished municipal complex that groups village hall, the police department, post office, library and recreational facilities.

In Carol Stream it resulted in an actual "Town Center," a village green of sorts surrounding a fountain, lakes and a bridge.

Village President Russ Ferraro said the hope is to see each corner of the area dotted with commercial development.

"We didn't have some place in the village that we could identify with," Ferraro said about his now eight-year-old plan to fashion the Town Center. "Now we have someplace to go."

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