This past weekend I went on a walking tour of Riverside, Illinois. The tour was given by the Frederick Law Olmsted Society. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were the architects who designed and built the village of Riverside in 1869. Riverside is one of the earliest planned communities in the United States and the Riverside Landscape Architecture District was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.
Riverside has been called a village in a park because of its curved roads that follow the bend of the Des Plaines River. Riverside also has a central village square that is located at the Metra BNSF Riverside train station. The train station was built in 1901. It also has a lot of greenspace because it has several large parks and 41 smaller parks and plazas at various intersections throughout the village. Many homes and estates were designed by famous architects of the time such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenney, Frederick Clarke Withers, Calvert Vaux and Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Another major period of development happened in the 1920s and 1930s when smaller houses were constructed on smaller plots of land. The village has an eclectic mix of different types of buildings including smaller bungalows, larger Victorians and huge early twentieth century mansions. The photos below are from the South Side tour. I plan on taking the North Side tour next Spring. I hope you enjoy viewing these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!
Very interesting. The last picture, was that a mural painted on the building. The houses remind me of some of the ones in the 1940 and 50s movies.
Yes. The last photo is a mural on the wall of a business in downtown Riverside. It definitely felt like a step back in time!