Eight miles west of downtown Chicago sits a suburb with a rich, vibrant history. Berwyn began in the 19th century as two separate communities with vast stretches of marshland and farmland between. By the early 1900s, this booming municipality successfully kept industry at bay while remaining a strictly residential development. As thousands of bungalows were constructed in the 1920s, the "City of Homes," as it was known, became the fastest-growing

Chicago Heights is a multicultural tableau, depicting the story of nineteenth-century pioneers and twentieth-century workers who built one of the most vibrant of the small, industrial cities of the Midwest. The exciting collection featured here is a result of an intensive city-wide campaign to identify the very best photographs of old Chicago Heights.

About half came from the extensive collections of the Public Library and the Historical Society,

This new addition to the Images of America series

traces the history of Lockport, Illinois, from the

height of its canal activity in the late 1860s to its

decline as the lifeblood of the town in the early

20th century. Lockport's story is revealed here in

over 200 vintage photographs that trace the town's

progress from its early days through the 1970s, when

the canal reappeared as a recreational and tourist attraction. In Lockport,

Prairie Avenue evolved into Chicago's most exclusive residential street during the last three decades of the 19th century.

Chicago's wealthiest citizens—Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and George Pullman—were soon joined by dozens of Chicago's business, social, and civic leaders, establishing a neighborhood that the Chicago Herald proclaimed a cluster of millionaires not to be matched for numbers anywhere else in the