FOR SALE: 700-acre former Army base, 25 miles north of the Loop, with more than 450 buildings enclosing more than 2.9 million square feet. Golf course, 1.75 miles of beachfront, 900 century-old oak trees, and 11 plant species threatened or endangered in Illinois. Asking between nothing and $2 billion. Final decision on sale and price to be made by a former congressman from Wyoming.
Why fight over an old fort? Its value lies more in where it is than in what it is. Squeezed between Lake Forest on the north, Highland Park on the south, tiny Highwood on the west, and Lake Michigan on the east, the fort would be precious real estate if it were a cornfield. As it happens, it’s an oak-lined campus ending in bluffs overlooking the lake 40 feet below. (One of the better-kept secrets of the North Shore is that the fort is an “open base”; anyone can come in and visit the museum, walk on the beach, or even, for a fee, use the boat launch.)
A developer so anxious to get ahold of the property that out of the blue he sent the Defense Department a check for half a million dollars.
And a Republican congressman trying to forge a consensus.
By 1889 Fort Sheridan had a few permanent buildings, the first in a series of 66 designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird and Roche. It was no coincidence that Holabird’s father, Brigadier General Samuel Holabird, was quartermaster general of the Army at the time. After 1890 new forts had to follow standardized plans, and after 1896 the use of private architects was outlawed altogether, so this fruitful nepotism was not repeated elsewhere.
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For a quick, crude picture, visualize the fort as consisting of three ribbons of land running east-west from Sheridan Road to Lake Michigan. The northernmost strip is mostly open–grass and oak trees and golf links and a helipad. The central strip is the “historic district,” including the tower and its massive and adjacent barracks (now offices) plus curving lanes with handsome officers’ homes, each with its elegant arch. The district is doubly historic–on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, and a national historic landmark since 1983. The southern and thickest strip includes utilitarian World War II-era structures and a fair amount of modest 1960s ranch houses and duplexes. These are among Illinois’ least pretentious homes with backyard views of Lake Michigan.
Socially, the fort is something of an oddity on the posh North Shore; economically, it has never given its suburban neighbors quite the boost they might have hoped for in the early days. “At best,” writes historian Michael Ebner in Creating Chicago’s North Shore, the fort “was tolerated as a patriotic necessity.” During the early or middle 1960s, the three suburbs adjacent to the fort began considering what would become of the land if the Army left. Lake Forest now lays claim to about 150 acres at the north end, Highland Park to about 150 acres at the south end, and Highwood the middle and largest section.
