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OAK PARK This is one of the few places in the world where groups of strangers stop in the middle of a sidewalk to openly gawk at homes.
Such is daily life in Oak Park, which has the largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structures anywhere. Throngs of people, maps and booklets in hand, make their way around the historic district to view Wright's handiwork. It's like looking for Waldo.
But it wasn't always this way.
"In the early 1970s, you couldn't give away a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Oak Park," says Gloria Garofalo, director of public programs for the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation.
Chicago's urban problems were moving west at the time and threatening to overtake Oak Park, one of the city's oldest suburbs. But then the village enacted a series of laws that gave preservationists tax breaks and encouraged the restoration of historic homes.
"Once people were assured that the house was worth putting money into and the whole thing wasn't going to unravel, then the whole thing turned around," says Paul Kruty, associate professor of architecture history at the University of Illinois and an expert on the Prairie school of architecture started by Wright and his mentor, Louis Sullivan.
They were trying to create a new type of American architecture, an original form that owed nothing to Europe. Oak Park and other early Chicago suburbs were like blank sheets of drafting paper for this new breed of architect.
"Wright found a ready market for this new type of suburban architecture, designing homes on large lots. In Oak Park you can find a Wright home on nearly every block. But there are homes by other architects like him who were trying to create something new and original and American," Kruty says.
The designs were breathtaking for their time especially Wright's Prairie-style homes with their long, horizontal lines; the hipped roofs; the banding of the windows and their heavy use of geometric designs; and the broad, overhanging eaves.
But Wright wasn't immediately declared a genius it took him a decade to find his own style. His first job was as a 19-year-old working for Chicago architect J.L....