Oak Park, Illinois

Oak Park, Illinois is a village directly west and contiguous with Chicago, Illinois. For decades until the 1970's it was recognized as the largest village in America, with a population near 64,000. With demographic change and the force of ponderous tax burden on large families, its population has shrunk to barely over 51,000.

Adjacent to the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, Oak Park has a very high crime rate due to drug dealers and drug users. It has the third largest police force among towns in Illinois.

It is the hometown of Ernest Hemingway, who described it as a town of large lawns and small minds, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Ray Kroc, and is best known as the location of the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed many homes in Oak Park. Despite that, the village leaders of Oak Park have never created a Frank Lloyd Wright museum or study center, that being established in Taliesen, Wisconsin. Similarly, no depository of Hemingway's writings exist in Oak Park.

Oak Park has an increasingly large number of minorities, bringing with them the confrontational political sensibility and drug culture of the inner city to the extent that a Chicago Tribune article noted Oak Park and River Forest High School as being the drug distribution center of western suburb youth. An Oak Park youth was murdered in 2021 in the high-crime Lawndale district of Chicago while involved with drug sellers. Under the excuse of "equity," a black mob stormed the home of the village president and devastated his garden and graffitied his sidewalk while the police stood by, not wanting to appear racist.

In the early 1900's Oak Park became famous for its national champion high school football team led by Bob Zuppke, who later became the football coach at the University of Illinois.