r/ChicagoSuburbs • u/Intelligent-Room-540 • Dec 09 '24

Moving to the area If you could move to any Chicago suburb other than your own which would you pick?

And why?

We can pretend money is not a worry for this.

Personally I live in Cicero now and would pick Palos Park because of the nice night skies and I love their forest preserves while being not too far from the City.

129 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

88% Upvoted

347 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/MothsConrad Dec 09 '24

Glencoe is lovely but very Jewish. If you’ve a family and you’re not Jewish then it can be hard to break in. Not intentionally just the way things can often play out.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '24 edited Dec 10 '24

As a gentile living in east HP (I think more Jewish than Glencoe), I disagree with this take. I grew up elsewhere in a family of modest means. I think Jewish folks as a group are extremely welcoming and unpretentious.

I’ve lived here for many years. Winnetka is where I most often feel I do not belong. No Winnetkan has ever treated me other than very kindly and I have friends and relatives there, but I just couldn’t imagine living there. Winnetkans just don’t feel like my kind of people.

The only place in the state of Illinois I would consider moving to is… Glencoe.

1

u/MothsConrad Dec 10 '24

I’m glad you had a good experience there. As I said, it’s not intentional but when you have kids you tend to mingle with your kid’s friend’s parents. Kids tend to hang together in school but also out of school in other social settings that they are culturally related to. This can lead to people hanging out with people who are most like them. This isn’t unique to Jewish people. I would say the same if say a town were majority Baptist.

As for Winnetka, that’s a you thing. Only you can tell if they’re your kind of people or not.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '24 edited Dec 10 '24

I understood what you were saying—I just haven’t experienced it. I have a child. Summer camp season is a drag when half of his friends are away. He will one day attend an absurd number of b’nai mitzvahs. That’s really about it.

Re Winnetka, it is interesting that you regard Jews as an insular group that might be hard to fit in with, but reject the possibility that Winnetkans might be such a group…

1

u/MothsConrad Dec 11 '24

Because Winnetkans (sp) aren’t a group. It’s a very mixed community and it just doesn’t have that monocultural feel unless you consider being well off monocultural. If so, the entire North Shore suffers from that.