If you stood on Western Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets in 1929 and stared off to the west, four tall apartment buildings would have stared back at you from the west side of Artesian Avenue — and almost nothing else. Today those four apartment buildings, 11608, 11624, 11630 and 11642 S. Artesian Ave., are sometimes lost in the growth of trees that has occurred since 1929, but they still stand as sentinels above the Beverly Woods neighborhood.
These four apartment houses are certainly the most prominent survivors — and may be the only survivors — of the Village of Beverly, a real estate development which began when Harold J. McElhinny and William S. Maxwell purchased from Mount Hope Cemetery the 82 acres bounded by 115th and 119th Streets, Western Avenue and the Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal Railroad tracks in July 1926.
Maxwell had been a successful developer in the Beverly/Morgan Park neighborhood for more than ten years, but appears to have bitten off more than he and his partner could chew with this project. In his previous construction projects, Maxwell had always built on lots where the water and sewer lines were already laid, but of course the cemetery had made no such provision, for although they would have needed a large population on the land, the need for water and sewage disposal would have been minimal.
Maxwell and McElhinny had therefore to lay their own water and sewage lines and, since the land was in unincorporated Cook County, would have had to purchase water from some other community and make connection with the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Chicago (now known as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District) for sewage disposal. To make a long story short, McElhinny and Maxwell soon found themselves faced with utility and construction bills approaching half a million pre-Depression gold-backed dollars. In order to avoid bankruptcy, they needed to find a way to share these costs with other landholders of the area, and they hit upon a solution: they would become a village and assess the cost of the street improvements to all the village property owners.
Accordingly, on July 31, 1928, Maxwell and McElhinny obtained the signatures of 24 field workers they encountered near their development and petitioned the courts to establish a new political entity. They then held elections for the village officers on October 2.
The voters all seem to have been members of the Maxwell family or his friends or employees, so it is not particularly surprising that the elected village officers included William S. Maxwell as president and two of the three village trustees George W. Repp, Maxwell's architect, and Repp's wife Dorothy.
The various village officers had established their official residences in the village shortly before the election in a collection of portable wooden shacks trucked to the west side of Western Avenue.
Needless to say, the announcement of this village came as something of a surprise to the majority of its residents, especially since the legal notices of the election were carried in the Niles Center News, a local newspaper for what is now Skokie.
Legal actions ensued, both on the part of the village residents to disannex themselves and on the part of the State's Attorney of Cook County to have the whole proceeding declared null and void. These did not ever end when what was left of the Village of Beverly voted itself into Chicago on Nov. 4, 1930, for in 1932, Maxwell was still trying to validate the assessment against those property owners who had not withdrawn from the village or protested their assessments.
The apartment houses, which almost certainly were designed by George W. Repp, are in keeping with McElhinny and Maxwell's original plan, a cross with uneven side members, and the foot of the cross extended to the rear of the lot. The building at 11642 S. Artesian is in Italian Renaissance style, the two at 11608 and 11624 in a variant of Tudor known as Germanic (with an actual basis in early 20th Century German houses). The one at 11630 can only be called eclectic, combining a gambrel roof, a Tudor parapet above the first story of the bay, and a Gothic arch over the door.
Each building has three apartments plus one in the basement. All have very elaborate entrances, and the entry at 11608 has skillfully been transformed into a gatehouse.
Although these four apartment houses have a dubious past, today they carry a certain distinctive air that lends color and variety to their block and fills their beholder with delight.