On a warm, sunny day in July, I took a ride to the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago. By coincidence, it happened to be just a few days after the city’s most distinctive landmark was officially renamed. It’s now called the Willis Tower, for a London-based insurance company that acquired the naming rights. I had come to Chicago to contemplate urban sprawl, so the timing seemed symbolic: Sears began to lay plans for the tower in the 1960s and built it in the early 1970s, back when major corporations still saw our historic city centers as the real seats of power. But that would change, and by 1989 Sears was planning to build a sprawling, 786-acre office park some 33 miles northwest of downtown, in a suburb called Hoffman Estates.
Hoffman Estates did not exist at all until 1954, when the father-and-son team of Sam and Jack Hoffman bought a 160-acre farm in rural Cook County and subdivided it into half-acre lots, on which they built hundreds of modest, single-family homes. Their timing was excellent. The federal government had just begun a 79-mile extension of Interstate 90 from Chicago’s O’Hare airport to Rockford, Illinois, passing right by their new plots. The tollway opened in 1958, the same year that O’Hare’s international terminal opened, kicking off a multiyear expansion project that would turn a tiny military airstrip into the world’s busiest airport.
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Category: Naked Apartments
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