Chicagoland, America's funpark!

The Tribune published today its last section of its three-part "Unauthorized Suburbia," a biographical-ish look at what makes the suburbs so special. This one focuses on "do's and don't's; previous installments looked at suburban history and quirks. Read also the prequel/companion piece, "Unauthorized Chicago," a primer on this great city. Good reading all, full of interesting history and trivia about this place we call Chicagoland.

One of the articles from yesterday focused on Barrington, my home town, in all its incarnations. I often say Barrington is the only suburb I know that has suburbs of its own.

There are seven villages that make up Barrington, plus one "township" that acts as a catch-all for the bits of land in between and one pretender to the name. In addition to Barrington proper, there's North B. South B., Lake B., B. Hills, Deer Park and Tower Lakes. Cuba Township mops up the edges, and Port Barrington shares the zip code but isn't an official member of the club; it was only a couple years ago that it changed its name from Fox River Valley Gardens, after all.

Barrington High School draws kids from all these places (well, not Port Barrington -- they go to Wauconda) as well as parts of Carpentersville, Fox River Grove, Hoffman Estates and Inverness -- which used to be a stepchild of B'ton, which oversaw much of its municipal duties (police, fire, etc.) in cooperation with Palatine. (Interesting story about Inverness: its village hall is housed in what used to be one of Al Capone's .) So despite B'ton's reputation as a rich town, we had a wide range of incomes represented, from lower-middle class all the way up to filthy rich.

It was pretty odd growing up there. I moved there from Lake Zurich when I was 10, into an unincorporated neighborhood in Lake Barrington -- which meant I was officially in Cuba Township, according to the small red-and-white sign that said "Cuba Township Highway District" just inside the neighborhood entrance. There was a surprising amount of clashing between kids from different villages, but all that melted away in favor of solidarity as soon as we came up against kids from a neighboring town.

You see, the money gave Barrington a black eye when it came to sports, etc. -- we had a reputation for being "rich snobs" as far away as Fon du Lac, Wisconsin. Even the North Shore hates us, viewing us as "new money" or something thanks to the rivalry between BHS and New Trier. A friend of mine came back from her first semester at U of I with a story of someone asking why there weren't silver dollars in her penny loafers when it came out that she was a Barringtonite. I still catch evil eyes sometimes from people who don't like the town for some reason. It's silly, of course -- I live in Rogers Park now, so clearly I'm not pulling down the crazy cash that some of my hometown compatriots are, but the taint has followed me anyway.

Posted by Andrew Huff at August 1, 2003 02:35 PM