3D ultrasound Oak Park

Oak Park, IL, is a suburb of Chicago bordering the west side of the city of Chicago. It is considered to be a Near West Suburb of Chicago. Oak Park is the twenty-fifth largest city in Illinois, with a population of 52,524 people, according to the now outdated 2000 Census, and the city covers a little over 4.5 square miles.

Oak Park is best known for its many Prairie Style houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, as the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, and the hometown of many celebrated citizens and businesses. Oak Park has also been informally known as the best place for young adults growing up in the Chicago area to settle down and start a family.

In 1837, Joseph Kettlestrings purchased 173 acres of prairie land just west of Chicago and east of the Des Plaines River. In the 1850s the land on which Oak Park sits was part of the new Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois. The population of the area boomed during the 1870s, with Chicago residents resettling in Cicero following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The name of the region was change to Oak Park in 1872, and the Village of Oak Park was formally established in 1902 after disengaging itself from Cicero, Illinois.

Oak Park had a history of alcohol prohibition, which was relaxed in 1973 and further loosened recently in 2002, although you would still be hard pressed to find a local bar in Oak Park. Recently, Oak Park demographics have shifted from long-term, more conservative residents, to younger, urban, more liberal residents. The division between old and new residents was demonstrated by a formal survey of residents taken in 2004, which found that more than half of its current residents had lived in Oak Park for less than ten years, and one-third had lived in the village fewer than five years.

The extension of the Lake Street “L” to Harlem Avenue at the turn of the century linked Oak Park more closely to Chicago, and it was one of the first suburban stops in the system. Oak Parkers watched first-hand in the 1960s as Austin's residents fought desperately to defend their community from a destabilizing influx of African American home-seekers, with little success as "resegregation" was rapid and tumultuous. Oak Park devised a different strategy, which would use planning to ensure that desegregation would not lead to resegregation. The village board created a Community Relations Commission charged with preventing discrimination, forestalling violent neighborhood defense mechanisms, and setting a high standard of behavior as the community prepared for imminent racial change. Village officials, often joined by clergymen, visited blocks to which families of color might move and carefully sought to control the fears and rumors generally associated with neighborhood succession. They identified white families who would welcome the newcomers. They encouraged African American families to disperse throughout the village to counter concerns of clustering and ghetto formation. In 1968, after lengthy and angry debate, and the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, the village board passed an open-housing ordinance allowing officials to control many aspects of racial integration that otherwise were likely to lead to resegregation. Real-estate agents were banned from panic-peddling, blockbusting, and the use of “for sale” signs. A community relations department would address rumors, monitor the quality of services and amenities throughout the village, and establish block clubs to promote resident cohesion and local problem-solving. The police force expanded by one-third, with a residency requirement whose impact was magnified because police generally lived in areas most likely to be threatened by resegregation. An equity assurance program for homeowners would reassure residents that they were financially protected against a downward spiral of property values. Leaders acted on a vision of Oak Park as a community strong enough to achieve integration, and able to challenge the Chicago pattern of block-by-block resegregation with a policy of managed integration through dispersal. The most controversial policies involved racial steering. A group of residents led by Roberta Raymond established the Oak Park Housing Center, which retrained real-estate agents to prevent racial steering and encouraged black home-seekers to live throughout Oak Park. The center worked with the village to improve areas that white home-seekers or residents might find unattractive and steered whites towards these areas to limit the concentration of black residents in a particular neighborhood. A public relations campaign targeted white home-seekers across the country to promote an image of Oak Park as a multicultural, cosmopolitan middle-class community, close to the city, with good transportation and schools. Now, Oak Park has succeeded in maintaining a public culture that takes pride in its racial diversity.

Oak Park is a popular tourist destination in the Chicago area, especially for architects, as many come to view the many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings found throughout the village. The largest collection of Wright-designed residential properties in the world is in Oak Park. Other attractions include Ernest Hemingway's birthplace home and his boyhood home, the Ernest Hemingway Museum, and the three Oak Park homes of Tarzan's creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Another popular tourist attraction specifically for pregnant women is First Peek Ultrasound, a 3D ultrasound studio located in downtown Oak Park.

Oak Park is known in the Chicago area and throughout Illinois for its Oak Park and River Forest High School, or OPRF, which is also the public high school for the bordering village of River Forest. A comprehensive college preparatory school, OPRF has had a long history of not only turning out alumni who have made contributions in a wide variety of fields, but have consistently been eminently notable in their fields. Among these many contributors with which the school is associated are Pulitizer Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway, football hall-of-famer George Trafton (the first center to snap the ball with one hand), McDonalds founder Ray Kroc (although there is only one McDonalds located in Oak Park!), comedian Kathy Griffin, and the voice of Homer Simpson, Dan Castellaneta.

Oak Park is known for its famous people, including Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson from The Simpsons; Ernest Hemingway; Frank Lloyd Wright, famous architect; Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's; Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan; Carl Rogers, the famous psychologist known for his client-centered humanistic approach to psychology; Betty White, six-time Emmy Award-winning actress from The Mary Tyle Moore Show and The Golden Girls, and recent host of Saturday Night Live; Kathy Griffin, least known for her appearance as a nurse in Eminem's The Real Slim Shady music video; and Ludacris, three-time Grammy Award-winning American rapper and who also coincidentally once starred as himself in an episode of The Simpsons.

In addition to McDonalds having been started by Ray Kroc, a long-time resident of Oak Park, many other famous landmark businesses have started in Oak Park, including the business of James A. Dewar, inventor of the Twinkies, which is now the Hostess Cake Company; the privately owned M&M Mars Company, started by Frank Mars, who lived in River Forest, but was an honorary captain in the Oak Park police force; Sears, started by Richard W. Sears, who lived in Oak Park for most of his life once he moved his catalog business to Chicago; and First Peek Ultrasound, founded in Oak Park in 2008, which boasts the website name of OakParkUltrasound.com