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Shoreline Property Advisors
Evanston: 847-425-3844
New Buffalo: 269-612-4104
Fax: 847-572-5795
AskUs@ShorelineAdvice.com
Evanston Office
2929 Central Street
Evanston, IL 60201
New Buffalo Office
10 N. Whittaker Street
New Buffalo, MI, 49117
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Skokie (formerly Niles Center) is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. It is a Chicago suburb, on the northwest border of the city, that, per the 2000 census, had a population of 63,348.
Geography
Per the United States Census Bureau, its total area is 10.0 square miles (26.0 kmē), all land. The village is bordered by Evanston, Chicago, Lincolnwood, Niles, Morton Grove, Glenview, and Wilmette.
The village's street circulation is a standard street-grid pattern, with major east-west thoroughfare every half-mile: Old Orchard Road, Golf Road, Church Street, Dempster Street, Main Street, Oakton Street, Howard Street, and Touhy Avenue. The major north-south thoroughfares are Skokie Boulevard, Crawford Avenue, and McCormick Boulevard; the major diagonal streets are Lincoln Avenue, Niles Center Road, East Prairie Road and Gross Point Road.
Skokie's north-south streets continue the street names and (house number) grid values of Chicago's north-south streets — with the notable exceptions of Cicero Avenue, which is renamed Skokie Boulevard, in Skokie, and Chicago's Pulaski Road retains its original Chicago City name, Crawford Avenue. The east-west streets continue Evanston's street names, but with Chicago grid values, such that, Evanston's Dempster Street is 8800 north, in Skokie addresses.
Public Transport
The Chicago Transit Authority's Yellow Line rapid transit train (formerly the Skokie Swift) has its terminus at the Dempster Street station in Skokie. Currently, plans are underway to build a new Yellow Line train station at Oakton Street, to serve downtown Skokie and environs, it is slated to open in 2009.
Although the Yellow Line is the principal, and fastest transport to and from the city, the Village also is served with CTA and PACE bus routes and a Greyhound Bus Terminal at the Dempster Street train station. For automobile transport, Interstate 94, the Edens Expressway, traverses western Skokie, with interchanges at Touhy Avenue, Dempster Street, and Old Orchard Road.
History
In 1888, Skokie originally was incorporated and named Niles Centre, with the second word's spelling in French. Around 1910, the spelling of the Village's name was anglicised, to Niles Center; nevertheless, the Village's name caused its confusion with neighbour village Niles, Illinois, given that both villages were in Niles Township, in the event, in the 1930s there emerged a village-renaming campaign, finally, on 15 November 1940, Niles Center became the Village of Skokie.
In the real estate boom of the 1920s, the lands of the Village were much subdivided; many two- and three-flat apartment buildings were built, with the Chicago-style bungalow a dominant architectural specimen, until the Great Crash of 1929, and consequent Great Depression, stopped the boom, rendering the Village homeostatic. It was not until the 1940s and the 1950s, when the baby boom generation moved their families from Chicago to the suburbs, that Skokie's housing development began again. Consequently, the Village developed commercially, an example being the Old Orchard Shopping Center, currently named Westfield Old Orchard.
Toponymy
Virgil Vogel's Indian Place Names in Illinois (Illinois State Historical Society, 1963), records the name Skokie deriving "directly from skoutay or scoti and variant Algonquian words for fire. The reference is to the fact that the marshy grasslands, such as occurred in the Skokie region, were burned over, by the Indians, in order to flush out the game" and "Several persons declare that Skokie is the Indian word for marsh ".
Allowing for inevitable usage corruptions, this seems correct, because, until about thirty years ago, maps named the Skokie marsh as Chewab Skokie, a probable derivation from Kitchi-wap choku, the Potawatomi term denoting great marsh. Though undocumented, this explanation is credible, because it consists with the Skokie area's former physiography. Like-wise, Skokie might derive from the same Algonquian roots as derives the word Chicago — zh'gak and sh'kag, two, different voicings of the base words for skunk and wild leek in languages of this group. Moreover, in Native Placenames of the United States (U. of Oklahoma Pr, 2004), William Bright lists Vogel's Potawatomi derivation first, but adds reference to the Ojibwa term miishkooki (marsh) recorded in the Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary (Mouton, 1985), by Richard A. Rhodes.
- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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