Ravines, Architecture, and the North Shore's Cultural Heartbeat
The land was first settled in 1835 by Anson Taylor, a young storekeeper who came north along the lake when Chicago was barely two years old. The community began to take shape in the 1850s when Walter Gurnee, former mayor of Chicago and president of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad, moved to the area and established a railroad stop across the street from his home in 1855. The train stop created the nucleus around which the village developed, and the downtown that grew up around it has functioned as Glencoe’s commercial center ever since.
The village’s character was shaped significantly by Dr. Alexander Hammond, who arrived in 1867 and brought with him a vision of a planned, model suburban community. Glencoe was incorporated in 1869. One of its earliest acts was adopting Illinois’ first zoning code in 1921, a move that reflected both the village’s planning instincts and its desire to control its own physical character. The land-use plan adopted in 1940 has been adhered to with only minor changes in the decades since.
Glencoe has a history on questions of race that deserves acknowledgment. Unlike most North Shore communities, Glencoe had a meaningful Black population from its earliest years after incorporation, with African Americans settling in the village from the 1880s onward. The St. Paul AME Church was founded in 1884 and remains active today as the only African Methodist Episcopal church between Evanston and Lake Forest. By 1920, Glencoe’s Black population had grown to 676 residents, largely concentrated in a five-block area near Vernon Avenue. In the 1920s, a group of white community leaders used eminent domain and other property acquisition strategies to displace the residents of this area in order to create a park. The Black population fell by more than half between 1920 and 1930 and has continued to decline since. The Glencoe Historical Society documented this history in a major exhibit, and the village has engaged publicly with this record in recent years. Beach access was also segregated until a court injunction in 1942 allowed a Black family to purchase passes to the formerly white-only beach. This history is part of Glencoe’s story, and buyers and residents should know it.
The architectural legacy of Glencoe is extraordinary and largely unknown. The village holds the third-largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world, surpassed only by Oak Park and the Taliesin properties. The Ravine Bluffs subdivision, designed by Wright and landscape architect Jens Jensen beginning in 1915, includes six Wright-designed single-family homes, three Wright-designed entry sculptures marking the subdivision boundaries, and the only Wright-designed bridge ever built, spanning a ravine on Sylvan Road. Howard Van Doren Shaw, David Adler, Keck and Keck, and Minoru Yamasaki all designed significant work in the village. The North Shore Congregation Israel synagogue, designed by Yamasaki and completed in 1964, is a striking modernist structure that the Chicago Architecture Center has included in its tour programming. And in 2016, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects completed the Writers Theatre building, a performance space widely recognized as among the finest examples of contemporary theater design in the Midwest.
Living in Glencoe
Glencoe’s housing stock reflects 155 years of development shaped by the village’s green setting, its planning traditions, and its consistent demand from buyers who know precisely what they are looking for.
The oldest homes cluster near the downtown and the lakefront, where late Victorian and early Edwardian-era homes sit on deep lots with mature trees. The Ravine Bluffs area in the northern section of the village contains the Frank Lloyd Wright houses alongside other early 20th-century homes in a setting shaped by the ravine topography and Jensen’s landscape work. Mid-century modern homes, including a concentration of Keck and Keck-designed structures known for their solar orientation and prefigurative energy efficiency, occupy a distinct cluster in the village’s southern section near Highland Park. Estate-scale homes on larger lots fill the blocks along and near Sheridan Road closest to the lake.
The market operates at the upper end of the North Shore spectrum and shows the same sensitivity to small transaction volumes that characterizes most communities of this size. The Redfin zip code-level data for 60022 shows a March 2026 median sold price of $1.8 million, up 36.8 percent year-over-year, with homes averaging 48 days on market compared to 73 days the year prior. Rocket Homes data from May 2025 showed 30 homes for sale with a median price of $1,610,000, up 14.8 percent year-over-year. The Redfin city-level median from September 2025 registered $1.3 million, reflecting the mix of property types including the small downtown condominium inventory alongside larger single-family homes. The market has been rated very competitive, scoring 77 out of 100 on Redfin’s competitiveness index, with the lowest-vacancy commercial district on the North Shore supporting consistent demand.
The village is bounded on three sides by open space that will not be developed. The Cook County Forest Preserve, the Skokie Lagoons, and the golf courses that buffer the village’s western and northern edges create a permanent greenbelt that gives Glencoe a degree of spatial separation from neighboring communities unusual in suburban Cook County. That separation is one of the reasons the village has maintained its character across 150 years of development pressure.
The Glencoe Metra station on the Union Pacific North Line provides daily service into Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center, approximately 40 minutes on express runs. Green Bay Road and the Edens Expressway provide highway access south toward Chicago and north toward Lake County. The Green Bay Trail runs through the village, connecting cyclists and pedestrians to Winnetka to the south and Highland Park to the north. The North Branch Trail, a 20-mile paved bicycle route beginning in Chicago, terminates in Glencoe, passing through the Chicago Botanic Garden and the forest preserve before reaching the village. Pace bus route 213 connects Glencoe to the CTA Purple Line’s Davis Street station in Evanston, providing an additional transit option.
Businesses and Local Life
Glencoe’s downtown is compact, walkable, and intentionally local. The village has one of the lowest commercial vacancy rates on the entire North Shore, a figure that reflects both the demand for space in a community of this size and the village’s active economic development work. The downtown cluster, centered on Park Avenue and Vernon Avenue steps from the Metra station, holds independent restaurants, coffee shops, specialty retail, personal services, and professional offices in buildings that range from late 19th-century storefronts to contemporary infill.
Hometown Coffee and Juice has anchored the downtown coffee scene as a community gathering point. Guildhall brings serious dining to the village center. Frank and Betsie’s has served as a neighborhood restaurant fixture. Views of Lake Michigan from Park Avenue are unobstructed, and outdoor dining fills the sidewalks through the spring and summer months. The downtown’s scale, several walkable blocks rather than a strip corridor, makes it function as an actual center of village life rather than a collection of storefronts.
Writers Theatre, which moved into its permanent Jeanne Gang-designed home at 325 Tudor Court in 2016, is Glencoe’s defining cultural institution and one of the most respected intimate theater companies in the Chicago area. Founded in 1992 in the back of a bookstore, the company grew into an organization producing critically acclaimed work that draws audiences from across the North Shore and the city. Gang’s building, which received the American Institute of Architects Honor Award, seats 255 in the main space and 99 in the studio, and has become a civic landmark in a village not previously known for contemporary architecture. Productions have ranged from intimate literary adaptations to major new works and musical theater, with a season calendar running from fall through summer.
The Chicago Botanic Garden, technically outside the village limits but anchored at Glencoe’s northwest corner, is one of the five most visited public gardens in the United States. The 385-acre site encompasses 27 themed gardens and four natural areas on and around nine islands, with six miles of lake and lagoon shoreline. The garden draws over one million visitors annually to programming that includes seasonal exhibitions, plant collections of global significance, a nationally recognized graduate program in plant biology and conservation through Northwestern University, and year-round community events. For Glencoe residents, it is essentially a 385-acre backyard.
The Skokie Lagoons, a chain of seven lagoons in the Cook County Forest Preserve immediately west of the village, provide kayaking, canoeing, and fishing access in a natural setting shaped by Civilian Conservation Corps labor in the 1930s. The North Branch Trail runs through the lagoons system, connecting to the broader forest preserve trail network. The Glencoe Golf Club, established in 1921 as one of the first public golf courses on the North Shore, has grown into one of the finest public facilities in Cook County, operated by the village itself.
Glencoe Beach at Lakefront Park provides public swimming access with lifeguards on duty through the summer season, a playground and water play area for younger children, full-service concessions, and a beach house. The beach’s setting, at the base of wooded bluffs with views across Lake Michigan, is among the most beautiful on the North Shore.
The Glencoe Historical Society, housed at the Eklund History Center and Garden in the downtown, was founded in 1937 and preserves the village’s history through exhibits, archival research, and public programming. Its “Glencoe’s Black Heritage” exhibit, which opened in 2023, has been widely recognized for its rigorous and unflinching examination of how the village’s early integrated history gave way to displacement. The Fourth of July Parade, an annual community tradition with deep roots, runs through the downtown each year. The village hosts Memorial Day observances and seasonal programming through the Glencoe Park District.
Ravinia Festival, while technically within Highland Park’s borders, is effectively Glencoe’s neighbor, accessible within minutes by car or bicycle and by Metra from the Glencoe station to the Ravinia Park stop. For Glencoe residents, Ravinia is part of summer life in the same way it is for Highland Park.
Glencoe holds a set of assets that no other village on the North Shore can fully replicate in combination: the Frank Lloyd Wright collection, the Writers Theatre, the Chicago Botanic Garden at its doorstep, the Skokie Lagoons and forest preserve greenbelt, New Trier schools, a genuine downtown, and a physical setting shaped by ravines, bluffs, and open space on three sides. For buyers who want a smaller and quieter village than Winnetka while keeping the same school pipeline, the same proximity to the lake, and access to one of the most distinctive cultural landscapes in the Chicago suburbs, Glencoe is a compelling and often underestimated answer.
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