Chicago: Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio (August 2011)

My spouse and I visited the Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois for one partial day during August 2011. We have visited the city of Chicago several times in years past, but always visiting the tourist attractions within the city limits, so this sight always remained on our “to see” list until this year. We reached Oak Park via the green line to the Harlem exit (alternately, you can use the Oak Park exit). From the Downtown Loop area, it took about 30 minutes. Although several people recommended taking this train, it didn’t feel completely safe to me (despite my decent travel background); there were some stops just outside the Downtown area that admitted and dispatched some sketchy passengers. But we travelled there and back safely without any incidents, so perhaps my feeling of uneasiness was just a figment of my imagination. Oak Park is a lovely town, and the FLW neighborhood houses are a highlight. We took a combination tour, first strolling the neighborhood while listening to a self-guided audio tour on the MP3 players that the FLW studio provided (the players weren’t difficult to use; however, the young man handing them out and providing explanations made them seem so). The walking tour took about 1.5 hours; however, we did not go inside Unity Temple, which we feel would have added an additional half hour to hour to the walking tour. Our walking tour was followed by a 1-hour guided tour of the home and studio. Visiting on a summer Saturday afternoon, we booked our tickets ahead of time online (using their Etix system), which was an excellent idea because some tours were sold out on the day that we were there. You could easily make an entire day of your visit to Oak Park, stopping for lunch and shopping at one of the many restaurants and stores nearby. The home and studio was where FLW spent the first 20 years of his career (from the late 1890s to the early 1900s) testing out his concepts on the home of his first wife and six children, and it has been preserved beautifully. You cannot take photographs inside either the home or the studio. There is a nice gift shop on-site, but no cafe. There are just a few restrooms, and lines were long. The site also provides a locked bag check area if you bring along a purse or backpack that you don’t wish to keep with you on the tour.