America's Original GI Town Park Forest, Illinois Hardcover – April 18, 2025

“Park Forest swallows up more civic energy per hundred people than any other community in the country.” – William H. Whyte, Jr. The Organization Man 1956At the end of World War II, Americans grew increasingly concerned about housing for returning veterans, relocated defense workers, and their families. Designs like the garden city, which originated before the turn of the twentieth century, became prominent again as planners acknowledged a renewed need for ready-made communities. One such community — among the first and perhaps most representative — was Park Forest, Illinois, a privately built and publicly managed town located twenty-six miles south of Chicago.In this book, Gregory Randall presents the history of the planning, design, construction, and growth of Park Forest. He shows how planners, who dubbed the new community a “GI Town,” drew on lessons learned from English Garden Cities and New Deal Greenbelt Towns to address America’s emerging peacetime housing crisis. He also illustrates how this new town influenced community planning throughout the United States, including its impact on community development into the present.“Randall’s account of Park Forest effectively challenges the conventional distinction between the 1930s idealism and the postwar materialism that shapes so many accounts of post-1945 America.” –Robert Fishman, Journal of American History, author of The Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia“Randall makes a valuable contribution with his book, the first full-length history of the [Park Forest] community … [it] will be a boon to scholars in exploring some of the many interesting questions surrounding Park Forest and the postwar suburban phenomenon.” —Robert W. Blythe, Vernacular Architecture Newsletter“Randall has written an engaging and instructive book. What I especially like about Randall’s work is that it provides the reader with a holistic appreciation of a distinctive community. That he does so as an insider makes his narration all the more compelling.” –Michael H. Ebner, author of Creating Chicago’s North Shore: A Suburban History“This is a sound history, an engaging, crisp narrative.” – Arthur W. Turner, Journal of Illinois History“. . . he develops a detailed overview of the ideas behind residential community-planning, contributing to a useful and growing body of literature regarding the sociology and historical emergence of suburbia.” –Steve Martens, Department of Architecture, North Dakota State Read more