Introduction -- Beginnings: New England village. -- The gilded age: 1865-1885 -- American renaissance: 1885-1896 -- The great estate era: 1897-1917 -- The great estates: village and townspeople -- Market Square -- Great estate life-cycles: three stories.

Introduction -- The gilded age: 1865-1885 -- American renaissance: 1885-1896 -- The great estate era: 1897-1917 -- The great estates: village and townspeople -- Market Square -- Great estate life-cycles: three stories.

On Lake Michigan's North Shore, an extraordinary group of cosmopolitan and wealthy clients commissioned havens from the city's bustle during the Gilded Age.

See how Lake Forest's downtown and Central Business District have been the heart of the community for over 150 years. Lake Forest is a picturesque city built on the shores of Lake Michigan and has been home to Chicago's capitalist families, who developed estates around beautiful Lake Forest College. For over 150 years, the Lake Forest Central Business District has been the heart of the community. Now, you can see for yourself why that is thanks to never-before published photographs from personal collections, the estate of Griffith, Grant and Lackie, the City of Lake Forest and others.

Since the 1850s, Lake Forest, located 30 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, has been a distinctive suburb. It has been a retreat from the diseases, public accessibility, rougher elements, soot, stockyard smells, and general density of bustling city life. For at least five generations, it has been the retreat for Chicago's leading New England-descended families, such as the Farwells, Swifts, and Armours. And for over 150 years, Lake Forest has been the home for a community of educators, merchants, artisans, designers, and a wide variety of estate specialists, the latter from pre-Civil War escaped slaves and Scots and Irish immigrants to today's notable garden and interior artists. Legendary Locals of Lake Forest draws on rare archival images from local and Chicago public and private sources.

Howard Van Doren Shaw designed stately country houses in and around Chicago—from affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Indiana—from 1894 to 1926, a period in American architecture that spanned the Gilded Age, the adoption of Beaux-Arts classicism as the ideal for civic architecture, the invention of the skyscraper, and the beginning of modernism. Born in 1869, he worked for the leading industrialists of that period, including Reuben H. Donnelley of printing fame, newspaper giant Joseph Medill Patterson, Edward Forster Swift, the meatpacking king, and Edward L. Ryerson of Ryerson Steel. A contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Shaw explored many of the same ideas as the Prairie School Architects within the forms of traditional architecture. Though he was recognized as one of the leading country house architects of the early twentieth century, his name was largely forgotten after his death. Like many traditional architects practicing today, Shaw was skilled at adapting historic precedents to suit contemporary living, in particular the easy flow of interior space that became a design hallmark of the period for traditionalists and modernists alike. For the new and fashionable suburb of Lake Forest, Shaw created Market Square, the town center, which was lauded for its design as both a unique town green and the first American shopping center designed to accommodate automobiles. This timely reappraisal of Howard Van Doren Shaw’s work features many previously unpublished images from the Shaw Archive in the Burnham and Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago History Museum, rare construction drawings, and new color photography as well as a catalogue of Shaw’s residential work. His legacy includes substantial houses in prosperous communities, many of which are still standing—including Ragdale, once Shaw’s own summer house in Lake Forest, now home to the prestigious artists’ community; the Becker Estate on Chicago’s North Shore; and The Hermann House overlooking Lake Michigan.

From the author of Hostage to Fortune; The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy ("Superb" —Michael Beschloss; "Remarkable" —Arthur Schlesinger), the galvanizing story of Eleanor Medill (Cissy) Patterson, celebrated debutante and socialte, scion of the Chicago Tribune empire, and the twentieth century's first woman editor in chief and publisher of a major metropolitan daily newspaper, the Washington Times-Herald. She was called the most powerful woman in America, surpassing Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Clare Boothe Luce, and Dorothy Schiff. Cissy Patterson was from old Republican stock. Her grandfather was Joseph Medill, firebrand abolitionist, mayor of Chicago, editor in chief and principal owner of the Chicago Tribune, and one of the founders of the Republican Party who delivered the crucial Ohio delegation to Abraham Lincoln at the convention of 1860. Cissy Patterson's brother, Joe Medill Patterson, started the New York Daily News. Her pedigree notwithstanding, Cissy Patterson came to publishing shortly before her forty-ninth birthday, in 1930, with almost no practical journalistic or editorial experience and a life out of the pages of Edith Wharton (or more likely the other way around: shades of Cissy are everywhere in the Countess Olenska). Amanda Smith writes that in the summer of 1930, Cissy Patterson, educated at the turn of the century at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, for a vocation of marriage and motherhood and a place in society, took over William Randolph Hearst's foundering Washington Herald and began to learn what others believed she could never grasp—how to run and build up a newspaper. She vividly lived out the Medill family's editorial motto (at least in spirit): "When you grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page." Patterson soon bought from Hearst the Herald's evening sister paper, the Washington Times, merged the two, and became editor, publisher, and sole proprietor of a big-city newspaper, a position almost unprecedented in American history. The effect of the merger was "electric"... By 1945, the Washington Times-Herald, with ten daily editions, was clearing an annual profit of more than $1 million. Amanda Smith, in this huge, fascinating biography gives us the (infamous) life and monumental times of Cissy Patterson, scourge of liberals, advocate of appeasing Hitler, lover of poodles, and hater of FDR. Here is her twentieth-century Washington: its politics and society, scandals and feuds, and at the center—the fierce newspaper wars that consumed and drove the country's press titans, as Patterson took the Washington Times-Herald from a chronic tail-ender in circulation and advertising, ranked fifth in the town, and made it into the most widely read round-the-clock daily in the national's capital, deemed by many to be "the damndest newspaper to ever hit the streets."