An illustrated overview of the architects, designers and planners who have influenced Evanston's design history.

In 1974, middle-schooler Mary Barr and a dozen of her friends boys and girls, black and white sat for a photograph on a porch in Evanston, Illinois. Barr s book, both history and ethnography, emerges from her thinking about this photograph and its deep background. Using government documents, newspaper articles, and census data, Barr provides a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its families. Barr also tracked down all of the living people in her photograph and interviewed them about their experiences in Evanston and beyond. Ultimately, Barr comes to better understand the stories and the lies people tell about their communities, as well as the ways that inequality begets inequality, both in a historical sense and in the daily lives of her far-flung friends. "

Local historian Margery Blair Perkins (1907-1981) provides a detailed narrative charting the growth and development of the North Shore city of Evanston, Illinois, a place boasting a rich and multi-layered history. Perkins brings the citys past to life through stories of its residents, architecture, and growth over the years. She charts the development of the city from its earliest days when it was known as the settlement of Grosse Pointe and later Ridgeville to its modern manifestation as a bustling city just outside of Chicago. Within a larger historical narrative, Perkins provides biographies of noted residents as she documents the evolution of the citys organizations, cultural life and institutions, such as Northwestern University.