A New Town for a New Century

The following are excerpts from The Chicago Tribune, Monday November 8, 1976 p.77:

It's 1976 and you're driving into New Century Town. It's a 600 acre development at Illinois Highways 60 and 21 in Vernon Hills.

Five years earlier people would have said, "That's near Libertyville, isn't it?" but today that no longer happens. New Century Town has put Vernon Hills on the map in capital letters.

It probably has brought national attention to United Investment and Development Company because if the development is successful it will be recreated elsewhere around the country.

New Century Town is a carefully planned community featuring housing, shopping, recreation and jobs. It's not a grandiose town of 10,000 acres, but it works.

New Century Town features Hawthorn Center, a major shopping complex with Marshall Field and Sears as major tenants, plus about 130 smaller stores. It will have 1.4 millions square feet of space inside the enclosed mall but it could be expanded. 

Hawthorn Shopping Center, Vernon Hills, IL circa 1977

About 128 acres of New Century Town will be devoted to parks. Another 368 acres will be developed with buildings, including private and semi-private spaces. The remainder will go to roads.

New Century Town is designed to be an urbanopolois, a small well-planned community in an expansion corridor of a major metropolitan area.

It's designed to promote the orderly development of a much larger region by demonstrating what can be achieved through good planning.

It's a step forward in the art of urban planning, bring the best of what is known and adding some.

Says Philip Klutznick, Chairman of Urban, "Some people are inclined to say the cities are done; urban living is impossible. But I'm convinced the metropolitan area will continue to constitute the backbone of civilization.

"I don't believe we are at the end. We are probably at the beginning of our greatest experience."