A church steeple-laden college town with some cooooool Underground Railroad history and a crowded-for-a-reason French Market. (To the donut cart! Stat.)
Breakfast and burger joints abound, and it sits right along the weirdly reverse-tracked Union Pacific West Line (lots of theories on that one – none of them conspiracy-driven, more re: the practicalities of boarding or possible British origin of the folks calling the construction shots).
The neighborhoods vary in style, with blocks of painted ladies (Victorians, not the “of the night” kind), stretch north from downtown – while rows of classic Chicago brick bungalows sit northeast of campus. The rest is a mashup of split levels, ranches, some World’s Fair-era cottages – even a few terra cotta-roofed hacienda-style gems.
With everything from a petting zoo and the storied Chicago Golf Club, to the C.S. Lewis archives and annual outdoor Shakespeare play, Wheaton’s nice-to-haves run the cultural gamut. While not exactly a thriving hotbed of nightlife and a nonexistent cutting-edge club scene, Wheaton is a list-topper for great places to raise a family, and happens to be where we’ve designed some (self-declared) pret-ty amazing houses. Have a look.
