Around the Block: Feel Like a Party?
Feel like a party? Just head outside.
THE DEAD END
On Sunset Place, not much traffic gets through. Almost everything else does. Sunset Place is a small, dead-end street, which has certain practical advantages. There are fewer cars. Kids can wander between houses with some freedom. You can find them playing basketball or often, in a neighbor’s pantry. “There are kids everywhere,” resident Megan Oakford says. They play baseball in the street and basketball in one another’s driveways. There is a fair amount of hockey, too, which means pucks being shot with some regularity. Kids come in looking for snacks, say hello to whichever adults happen to be there, pet the dogs and leave again. The adults have developed their own informal system of exchange. There are hand-me-downs and shared food. Oakford borrows milk and sugar from her neighbor Angela. Conversations happen in driveways, often infrequently but efficiently enough that people tend to know the important things.
And there have been important things. Since 2020, six new families have moved onto Sunset Place. Other families have left as houses became too small. The block has also seen deaths, divorce and serious illness - the less picturesque parts of living near one another for a long time. The cast changes but the commitment to knowing one another seems not to. Whitney Weinstein sees it most clearly in the kids. When her son Morrison was younger, one of his first encounters with the neighborhood kids came at a lemonade stand at the corner of Oakford and McNicholas. The older children made room for him, gave him a place to sit and put him to work passing out lemonade. Now, she says, some of his favorite nights are the ones when he is allowed to stay out late with the same neighborhood crowd.
“It really feels like the kind of neighborhood childhood you hope your kids get to have,” Weinstein says. There has long been some version of a block party here. Oakford remembers years when it centered around Halloween, with former resident Megan Jensen looking after the neighborhood children before they made their way to Center Street. More recently, Kim Shortsle and Luke have taken up the job. “Sunset Place is one tiny street in Lake Bluff,” Kim says. “We don’t get a lot of traffic since we are a dead end. We moved in and thought, let’s gather to see how we can support, laugh and be together.” The most recent plan was for a couple of hours. It lasted the evening.
THE ONE-HOUSE BLOCK PARTY
When JT Trombley turned 50 in September, his wife Courtney, raised in Lake Bluff, had a fairly ambitious idea for the celebration: close down part of Scranton Avenue. She applied for the street closure months in advance, coordinated with neighbors, arranged for barricades - and, on the morning of the party, delivered flowers to nine nearby homes asking for a little patience with what was coming next: a DJ. Several of those neighbors eventually wandered over for a drink. The Village made the closure easy, Courtney says, and police even checked in to see if they could help. By the end, friends had given the celebration a name: JT’s 50th: the one-house block party.
A NORTH AVENUE TRADITION
For more than 30 years, anyone lucky enough to live on North Avenue gathered for an end-of-summer block party. Resident Josh Fox says neighbors unofficially date the annual North Avenue Block Party to the early 1990s. The guest list is refreshingly uncomplicated: if North Avenue is in your address, you’re in. For the adults, it’s a chance to catch up with longtime neighbors and meet the new families moving onto the block. For the kids, it’s the best day. “They love the idea of the street being blocked off so they can ride up and down unfettered by everyday parental restrictions,” Fox says.
North Avenue neighbors: James and Shasta Swaine, Megan and Bill Hadler; Anna Fox and Abigail Swaine.
