Lake Forest Improvement Trust (LFIT)/Market Square
Lake Forest's Market Square, designed by the architect of several campus buildings Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926), was built in 1916 and became the model for shopping centers that began to be developed in the 1920s in California, Florida, the Chicago region, and elsewhere. Susan Dart, a granddaugther-in-law of Shaw, wrote a book, Market Square, in 1984, published by the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, which covered the local historical interest, historic and detailed new photographs and the plans of Market Square as built.
In 1998 local resident and historian Shirley M. Paddock, working with Gordon M. Lackie (Lake Forest College Class of 1949) of Griffth Grant and Lackie, Realtors, Inc. (GGL), discovered in that firm's archives the papers of the Lake Forest Improvement Trust, formed in 1912/1913 to redevelop Lake Forest's central business district. This showed that the 1916 development had been first envisioned in 1912 as Town Market (already pointed out from a news story in Michael Ebner's Creating Chicago's North Shore..., 1988) and then again redesigned in 1914. Lackie and his firm soon donated this archive of 2,000 leaves in two boxes along with approximately thirty drawings and plans to this repository, where Dart had also given her extensive research files in the mid 1980s. The fragile original correspondence, etc. has been photocopied and is available for use (Location, 23.4.2 and 3).
But the present Market Square configuration dates from a 1915 third plan that replaced a shallow park paralleling the 1900-built train station and Western Avenue on the fourth (east) side with a long park perpendicular to the station. As architectural historian Richard Longstreth explained in his 1997 book, City Center to Regional Mall.... (MIT Press), this exapnded the prime frontage shop space by 300% and made this project the first viable commercially-driven town center of the City Beautiful Movement. It was also the first town center planned around motor vehicles (parking, alleys for trucks). Its charming architecture is based on English town planning practice of the era, from Port Sunlight, Liverpool (a 1916 clipping in the files) to Hempstead Garden Suburb, London. It borrows pre-Renaissance motifs from English and continental vernacular models, though Shaw introduces a strong classic, even Palladian, reference in the central, western building on the west side of the park. A carriage tour of Market Square in the summer of 2009, with Arthur Miller being interviewed, is available from the City of Lake Forest cable outlet.
The GGL materials covered the period of the planning, construction, and early operation of Market Square. After these papers came here, trustee Francis (Frank) Farwell II, who had been an officer of the Trust when it sold Market Square in 1984, donated as well the minutes of the LFIT board, between 1930 and 1946 and 1967 to1984 (see book 1, 1930-46, and book 3, 1967-84; book 2?, 1947-66 not present; location 23.5.2). These minutes cover the early and late periods after the Trust became the first real estate investment trust (REIT), and include the end of the Griffith firm management of the development in 1968 (June 12 minutes). In the adoption of the REIT model, this was one more way this was a pioneer development, innovating in its financial organization just as it had as a development a decade and a half earlier.
Other LFIT documents relating to its formal organization in 1913 and to its sale of Market Square in 1984 include (1) a photocopy of the January 15, 1913 printed Trust Agreement of Lake Forest Investment Trustees, unpaginated (15 pp.); (2) a photocopy of the Lake Forest Improvment Trustees Annual Report 1982, unpaginated (12 pp.); and (3) a photocopy of a letter (unpaginated, 4 pp.) on Trust letterhead to LFIT certificate holders, dated December 16, 1983, from Francis C. Farwell, Secretary-Treasurer, reporting on an agreeement to sell the Market Square properties to Mr. Robert Meers, and requesting return of a form signifying approval. This letter did not dissolve the Trust, but this was anticipated within sixteen years. These three photocopies are filed with the LFIT minutes.
Arthur H. Miller
March 4, 2010