Lake Forest earned its identity from the ground up: founded in 1857 alongside Lake Forest College as a planned community on the North Shore, it was designed from the start with winding roads through wooded estates rather than a conventional street grid. That intentional character still defines the city today, roughly 30 miles north of Chicago along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Major employers like Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital, Abbott Laboratories, and Pfizer give the local economy a strong institutional backbone, while two Metra commuter rail lines connect residents to Chicago's Loop in under an hour.
The city's eastern neighborhoods are something of an open-air architectural archive, with historic homes designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw, David Adler, and Frank Lloyd Wright lining roads that curve through preserved woodland. Western Lake Forest offers a more typical suburban feel, anchored by its own Metra station.
