Lake Forest is a city in Lake County, Illinois, United States. The population was 20,059 at the 2000 census. The city is south of Waukegan, Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan, and is a part of the Chicago metropolitan area and the North Shore.
Lake Forest was founded around its college and laid out as a town in 1857 as a stop for travelers making their way south to Chicago.
The Chicago Bears training facility and headquarters, Halas Hall, opened in 1997 in west Lake Forest, and the Chicago Fire now train at the Bears' previous facility located on the campus of Lake Forest College.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 43.8 km² (16.9 mi²). 43.7 km² (16.9 mi²) of it is land and 0.1 km² (0.1 mi²) of it (0.30%) is water.
As Lake Forest was first developed, the planners laid roads that would provide very limited access to the city in an effort to prevent outside traffic and further isolate the tranquil settlement from neighboring areas. Though considerably more accessible today, due in part to the extensive new construction taking place further West, the much smaller neighborhood of East Lake Forest, near the coast of Lake Michigan, remains relatively secluded and is among the most scenic, historical, and architecturally significant neighborhoods in Chicagoland. These neighborhoods include estates made by distinguished architects like Howard van Doren Shaw.
In 1967 a group of 12 long-time residents of Lake Forest formed a land conservation organization, Lake Forest Open Lands Association.[1] Its express purpose was to purchase or otherwise set aside the rapidly disappearing open spaces in the city, in the interests of preserving animal habitat, restoring ecosystems, and providing environmental education for the city's children. In the next 38 years, the group managed to acquire over 700 acres within the city limits, which now form six nature preserves with 12 miles of walking trails open to the public. Preserved in perpetuity are wetlands, original pre-1830 prairie, woodland and savanna, all within the city.
Lake Forest has been named a Tree City USA by the National Arbor Day Foundation in recognition of its commitment to community forest. As of 2006, Lake Forest has received this national honor for twenty-six years.
Commercial development in Lake Forest is focused in three areas, two of which have public railway stations. The central business district includes a Metra commuter railroad station on the Union Pacific/North Line and extends beyond Market Square, providing a mixture of retail, banking, and professional services, as well as restaurants. The business district to the west includes a Metra commuter railroad station on the Milwaukee District/North Line and extends beyond Settlers' Square to provide a mixture of retail, banking and professional services, as well as restaurants. A third area of business development, consisting mostly of corporate and office space, extends along the city's northwestern border with the Tri-State Tollway.
Lake Forest is famous in Chicago for its history of polo, being once the farthest-west establishment of the sport in the US. It was home to the "East-West clash of 1933" in which a team of "Westerners", today Midwesterners, challenged the best of the Eastern US polo teams, winning two of three matches. Box seats sold for $5.50 and the general public was admitted for $1.10. The Chicago press covered the match extensively, right down to the arrival of every horse and player, the color of the horseflesh and the color of the goalposts. The match was described as a "gleaming moment in American polo, if not the very zenith of the game in this country." Today, Lake Forest continues the tradition, and polo is played yearly throughout August. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan's polo ponies are said to have been bred in Lake Forest.