New book reveals secrets of city and suburbs

What's McHenry's salty past? The village was home to a pickle factory in 1876.

What could have been Schaumburg's name? Some early settlers wanted to call it Lutherville.

What was an Oak Brook gristmill's secret identity before the Civil War? It was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

All these factoids and more can be found by dipping into "Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs," a new historical guide edited by North Central College's Ann Durkin Keating.

The book contains more than 200 entries.

"It's for people who want to know a little bit more about their own community but also other neighborhoods and suburbs in the region and how they all fit together," Durkin Keating said.

The guide is a spinoff from the popular "Encyclopedia of Chicago," which Durkin Keating co-authored. Three related books on local religion, ethnic groups and businesses also are in the works.

"Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs" includes five thought-provoking essays by scholars such as Michael Ebner.

"It's five different ways of looking at the region," Durkin Keating said.

In her introduction to the book, she writes of working in the suburbs but living in Chicago.

"I work in the historic east side of Naperville but I live in Edison Park, a neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago and where I live determines my identity. I am a Chicagoan because I live in the city even if I spend more waking moments in Naperville," she states.

"But my experience of city living is very different from that of someone who lives in a high-density neighborhood like the Gold Coast. Like the suburbs that surround it, Chicago's neighborhoods vary dramatically."

Asked to give some examples of diversity, Durkin Keating referred to Bartlett, which "has its roots in an old farming community," and neighboring Elgin, which "has its origins in the industrial era."

Another juxtaposition is West Chicago and Wheaton, she said.

"West Chicago is an old train junction where trains would have been repaired and Wheaton is a college town."

Yet now, "they all merge into one another. That's one of the most interesting things about cities. You take any neighborhood or suburb and whoever lives there changes the definition of what the neighborhood is. Buildings are reused, churches become synagogues, synagogues become mosques."

That the region is continually evolving is one of the lessons of the book, Durkin Keating said. One example is Chicago's Cabrini Green community, once notorious for poverty and crime - now changing into something else with the demolition of its public housing units.

"Over time, different kinds of neighborhoods have filled an evolving regional shell," Durkin Keating writes. "This shell is relatively flat but is not featureless, having been shaped by natural and artificially constructed waterways, by patterns of railroad and expressway development, and by waves of migrants and immigrants who have made the Chicago region home."

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Related links</h2> <ul class="moreWeb"> <li><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=239466">Synopsis, contents of book </a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>