America's Original G.I. Town

America's Original G.L Town. By Gregory C. Randall (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 236, Ils., cloth, $42.50) Greg Randall, himself a professional landscape architect and planner, has written this book as a history of the planning of Park Forest, Illinois. Since I am the local history librarian for Park Forest Public Library, I can attest that the book fills a void by pulling together research and personal accounts scattered in various sources. At last, there is one book which describes the planning history and some of the early social and political history of the village. Earlier, William H. Whyte's book Organization Man covered the early sociological history of Park Forest. Park Forest was one of the first post- World War II planned suburbs built to meet the housing demands of returning veterans and their growing families. Carroll F. Sweet, Sr., having communicated his son, Carroll, Jr., about servicemen's concerns about where they would find housing after the war, was working for a Chicago developer and builder Nathan Manilow in his home building firm. Through a previous job the Chicago regional office of the National Housing Administration, Sweet, Sr., had come to know Philip Klutznick, Commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority. With Sweet's help, Nathan Manilow and Philip Klutznick joined forces to form American Community Builders to plan and build a new town shopping, schools and churches included in the plan. architectural firm Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett, and the planner Elbert Peets were brought into the project and began planning in 1946. Mr. Randall covers in thorough detail how the planners drew on the idealistic designs for garden cities and new towns and from the original plans and ideals behind the government-built Greenbelt towns of the 1930s. Some of the examples he uses are Frederick Law Olmstead's Riverside, Illinois, the plans for Radburn, New Jersey, Greenbelt, Maryland, Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio. With all of the background on the history of planning in England and America, this serves as good text on city planning and gives an interesting background to what historical precedents Park Forest's planners drew on in trying to make this one of the best examples of city planning to that date. Mr. Randall does an excellent job of placing Park Forest in the context of its time by tying in social, economic, and political developments of the era. Readers may find of particular interest Mr. Randall's Michener-like inclusion of the Indian tribes which populated the area in his First Residents chapter and the geological history of the region in his chapter The Planning. assembly-line building operation and efficient scheduling of the building processes and construction crews which allowed the construction of 3,010 housing units in two years is described in great detail. author points out that this, with the exception of wartime military housing, may have been the first time that such a system was employed to build that much housing. …