Plan of Evanston
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FOR a full half century Evanston has had a character. People have thought of it as a place distinct, somehow, from the other suburbs of Chicago-a place where certain material and moral advantages were enjoyed.
A legend of this sort does not grow without a root in the facts. The site of Evanston was strategically chosen at the convergence of the Ridge with the Lake Shore. It was the nearest high ground to Chicago that was on the lake. That is one root. The establishment of Northwestern University, and the clause in its charter which prohibited the sale of liquor within a four mile radius, was the other.
The people who settled here during the sixties and seventies were the sort of people to whom these advantages appealed. They wanted lots of light and clean air, plenty of room for their children to play about in, good schools, security for their youths from the temptations afforded by saloons; a local government free from the contaminations of big, fastgrowing, careless, unkempt Chicago. At a distance of twelve miles-forty-five minutes or so by infrequent trains, and they the only means of communication-the security seemed ample.
Those of us who remember the village when it boasted five thousand inhabitants-and the memory needn't be so very long to do it-the village with its gravel roads, capacious yards, its unbuilt squares every here and there, where the aboriginal oaks had not yet died of the drainage and one could always find wild flowers in the spring-we who can remember that will recall the innocent pride we took in the growing urbanity of the place, the handsome increase we showed in the census returns, the new school buildings, the Chicago, Evanston and Lake Superior Railroad, the orange colored electric cars which took us all the way in to the Diversey Street barns, where we could connect with the North Clark Street cable. We got ourselves a city charter, and annexed the vil-
