Overview
The O’Hare Community Area is easily the largest of Chicago’s 77 community areas, with a size of 13.34 square miles. However, it is also the least population dense (just 1000 people per square mile). This is because the vast majority of O’Hare’s area is not residential. Above is a map of O’Hare I made using Dave’s Redistricting Analysis. Below is a legend of what each color means.
Blue = Multi-Family Residential
Purple = Single Family Residential
Red = Industrial
Green = Forest Preserve
Yellow = Airport
As we can see, a majority of the space of the community area is taken up by the namesake O’Hare International Airport, with the Catherine Chevalier Woods and various industrial zones adding to it to make up a community area which is less of a neighborhood and more of an amalgamation of various uses of suburban land. Population is reported as 13,351, of which 11,109 in the Blue (multi-family residential) zone. Throughout the project I will focus on this area as the meaning of the Neighborhood of O’Hare, although the other parts of the community area bear studying. Some facts and figures will include the Purple zone (marked on the neighborhood map as Schorsch Forest View, although that seems to be a term solely used by cartographers and real estate developers).
O’Hare’s identity as a neighborhood does not seem to be coherent. There were few storefronts and “community spaces”, and fewer still seemed to encourage the idea of O’Hare as a distinct neighborhood. It is fairly isolated from the rest of the city, bounded by the North by a massive “edge city” and to the West by the woods. It shares only a very small border with the rest of Chicago. Instead, O’Hare seems to largely be a continuation of the Town of Norridge, which, along with the rest of Norwood Park Township (not to be confused with the Chicago neighborhood of Norwood Park), is surrounded entirely by the City of Chicago. It is a convenient location for blue-collar workers who wish to live far from the urban core, but are required by their city contracts to live within Chicago limits.
While it feels suburban in character - there is one feature of the neighborhood that stops me from lumping it in with the rest of suburban sprawl. The vast majority of O’Hare residents live in multi-family housing. According to the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Authority (CMAP), 87% of O’Hare Community Area residents live in multi-family dwellings. And when you take out the Schorsch Forest View subdivision, I would imagine that number is close to 100%. Seen below are the two major types of housing in O’Hare: three-story townhomes and larger twelve-flat blocks. Both are brick dwellings styled in the post-war mid-century boom that converted Chicago’s outer ring from patches of older settlements into mile after mile of suburban paradise. CMAP confirms this; 94% of all housing in O’Hare was built between 1940 and 1999.
ABOVE: Three-flat and 6/12-flat low-rise apartments that make up O'Hare's housing stock. In my opinion, this is the greatest type of housing found anywhere in Chicago.
Along with housing, the other attribute that I found binds O’Hare together as a distinct neighborhood is its avid walkers. I visited O’Hare on a gorgeous Friday afternoon; it was the last weekend before the weather turned chilly in Chicago. Even though O’Hare is an unending string of duplicate industrial housing surrounded by a ring of areas largely impossible to escape without a car, the neighborhood itself was surprisingly pleasant to walk through. Most streets were tree-lined and few cars were blowing through the neighborhood, even during rush hour. The vast majority of parents picking their kids up from Everett M. Dirksen Elementary School (named after the former U.S. Senator) simply walked their kids a few blocks home while chatting with other adults. There’s obviously a degree of good timing, but I sensed a much more pedestrian culture among families than I did in ostensibly New Urbanist neighborhoods which pride themselves on their dislike of the suburban way of living.
ABOVE: Grandparents Park, the only green space in the neighborhood. Named at the request of residents who made fond memories here with their grandparents.
Chicago is in the 41st Ward, which is represented by Alderman Anthony Napolitano, the only current member of the Chicago City Council to have been a Republican (he is currently not registered with a political party; the 41st Ward Committeeman is Joe Cook, an attorney for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District). The bulk of the 41st Ward is single-family residential and upper-middle class, including areas such as Norwood Park (the neighborhood), Edison Park, and a large chunk of Edgebrook. O’Hare shares some characteristics with these neighborhoods, as they are all white ethnic, socially conservative areas. But that’s where the similarities end. O’Hare is much more industrial and isolated than these other neighborhoods, the average income is considerably lower, and residents are much more likely to be immigrants (O’Hare is the last remaining neighborhood in the city where a majority of residents are not native-born citizens. It contains a large number of immigrants from Poland, the Balkans, and the Middle East.)
ABOVE: Chicago's Ward Map, with the 41st highlighted. About as suburban as you can get.
O’Hare shares even less similarity with its other political districts. It is in the 55th State House District represented by Democrat Martin J. Moylan, but is the only part of the entire city to be in that district. HD-55 stretches through Park Ridge, Des Plaines, and Elk Grove Village all the way out to the edge of Schaumburg, and O’Hare’s inclusion is more for political expediency than real representation. State Senate representation is even worse. That district (28th) is represented by Democrat Laura Murphy and stretches all the way to Hanover Park in DuPage County, and is closer to the border of Chicagoland than it is to O’Hare itself.
ABOVE: 55th House District. O'Hare is in the small southeast nib labeled "Chicago".
ABOVE: 28th Senate District, in classic Illinois fashion, connects unrelated neighborhoods and towns in the name of political expediency.
Better is O’Hare’s inclusion in the 16th Police District, which is centered in Jefferson Park and which includes much of the Far Northwest Side (Dunning, Portage Park, etc.) This is the area most similar to O’Hare in characteristics. O’Hare is in St. Eugene Parish, the seat of which is 7958 W Foster Ave (located in a small strip of land that separates O’Hare from the rest of the city; it is formally part of the Norwood Park Community Area but for all intents and purposes is part of Norridge Town). Finally, O’Hare comprises two census tracts, 760801 and 760803. The dividing line for the two seems to be at about W Evelyn Lane.
ABOVE: The 16th Police District. Note how awkwardly Chicago wraps around Norwood Park Township (which contains the Towns of Norridge and Harwood Heights).
Neighborhood history, as you may have gleaned, is rather straightforward and does not contain the quirks or dramatic changes that many of Chicago’s oldest neighborhoods have gone through. When World War II ended, a large Douglas Aircraft manufacturing plant was demolished and turned into a small commercial airport. Correctly sensing that Midway Airport would not be able to single-handedly manage all air traffic in the Chicagoland area, the City Council annexed O’Hare and the small strip of mostly empty land surrounding it, including the Chevalier Woods, over the objection of Schiller Park. A small ribbon of road was also included in the annexation, since Illinois law requires that all municipalities be contiguous. And so, O’Hare became Chicago’s 76th community area.
ABOVE: St. Joseph Ukrainian Catholic Church. O'Hare is only 3% Ukrainian, but people from across the North and West suburbs come to pray here.
O’Hare is one of the last truly company towns to be built. City policymakers and businessmen met and planned the new development. Before long, the part of the community area intersecting the Kennedy Expressway was filled with large office parks and corporate buildings. Cookie-cutter multi-story housing was built on the area bisecting Norridge, and the woods were left intact as a green belt so that residents of the city and suburbs could come together and enjoy a small ribbon of nature. The whole neighborhood seems definitively planned - nothing outwardly seems out of place, as is often the case in a community built for the sole purpose of revolving around one corporation or industry.
ABOVE: Office parks that separate Cumberland Station from the neighborhood.
Today, O’Hare retains its company town characteristic, although it is no longer an area solely for airport workers. Transportation is still the largest occupation, making up 17% of the jobs in O’Hare versus 4% in Chicago as a whole. The more common occupations of Administration (13%) and Sales (8%) are not too far behind, and are roughly on par with Chicago’s numbers as a whole. White flight in the 1950s-1980s saw many Chicagoans flee for the outer ring of neighborhoods to escape changing demographics in the inner city, and some of them settled in the cheap but pleasant neighborhood of O’Hare, where one can live in a low-rise apartment and have access to all the amenities of the suburbs. In the 21st century, immigrants from areas new to Chicago (Balkans, Ukraine, Arabia, etc.) arrived in Chicago and headed straight for suburban areas, marking a shift in immigration patterns. A good number of them have come to O’Hare. The the largest ethnic groups in O’Hare are: Polish (21%), Arab (9%), German (8%), Italian (8%), Irish (6%), Mexican (4%), Filipino (3%), Indian (3%), and Ukrainian (3%). There are dozens more ethnicities with 1 or 2 percent of the population, including Greek, Serbian, Moroccan, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and more, an astounding level of diversity not found in many Chicago neighborhoods of comparable size.
ABOVE: A rough sketch of the neighborhood. Not many "third places" other than the park, the church, and two elementary schools. North is up.
SOURCES:
Encyclopedia of Chicago: https://tinyurl.com/dj33nn6k
Chicago Municipal Planning Authority: https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/10180/126764/O%27Hare.pdf
Statistical Atlas: All ethnic and occupational data
Chicago Park District: https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/grandparents-park
Chicago Cityscape: https://www.chicagocityscape.com/maps/index.php?place=chipolicedistrict-16
Dave's Redistricting Analysis: Initial map of O'Hare Community Area Components and their population
ABOVE: A good chunk of O’Hare. Note that the Savannah Pattern is largely broken only by industrial and commercial areas, with only the Park being a “community distraction”. This is a lose-lose situation, since it both fosters monotony and forces that monotony on residents, since private property is not a “third place” and pushes residents back into their isolated neighborhood.
Social Mix
O’HARE FAST FACTS
Metric
O’Hare
City of Chicago
White Population
68%
33%
Asian Population
16%
7%
Hispanic Population
8%
29%
Black Population
7%
29%
Average Age
37
35
No High School Diploma
8%
14%
College Degree
41%
41%
Foreign Born
57%
20%
Speak Poor English
31%
14%
Speak Slavic Language
32%
3%
Median Household Income
$60,000
$62,000
MHI < $25,000
21%
23%
MHI > $150,000
8%
17%
Single Family Housing
13%
26%
Large Housing (>20 units)
45%
15%
Median home year built
1974
1951
Median number of rooms
5
5
Average Home Cost
$160,000
$350,000
Home Ownership
39%
45%
Public Transit Usage
17%
26%
Annual Miles Traveled (car)
21,000
11,000
Unemployment Rate
4%
8%
Employed Outside Chicago
55%
< 1%
High Walkability Areas
27%
96%
SIMPSON DIVERSITY INDEX CALCULATIONS
Note: As the O’Hare Neighborhood is close to coterminous with the O’Hare Community Area in terms of population, I did not calculate the community area value as it would be largely redundant.
Metric
# Variables
O’Hare
Northwest Side
City of Chicago
Race
4
2.15
3.39
3.39
Education
7
4.27
5.17
5.16
Income
16
10.59
12.77
13.91
Overall, O’Hare is somewhat less diverse than both the Northwest Side and the City of Chicago on Race, Education, and Income levels. It is much Whiter (albeit with a higher Asian population as well) and the normal bracket of income and education levels are also much smaller than they are within the city. I would have to hazard a guess that this is due to the very specific purposes for which O’Hare was created. While not everyone in O’Hare works at the airport, the design of O’Hare as a company town-type settlement attracts much more specific types of people than a larger and less architecturally uniform neighborhood. The result is a neighborhood that, while diverse in some respects, falls short of being a “microcosm of the city”.
That being said, I wonder whether or not it makes sense to compare any neighborhood to the City of Chicago or even the area of the City it is located in. Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the United States, and just because the city is diverse, does not mean that most neighborhoods are more diverse than O’Hare is. The Northwest Side is known for its economic (and, increasingly, racial) diversity, but a glance at the South and West sides, plus the Nearer North Side, does not exactly paint a picture of diversity when compared to O’Hare. Perhaps a good thing in the future would be to compare O’Hare to other similarly sized neighborhoods, as opposed to the city at large.