By Dennis Rodkin
For decades Huntley has been a smaller, dustier counterpart to Harvard and Woodstock, country towns dripping with charm and picturesque amenities. But in the past few years Huntley’s been bulking up as if on steroids. In 1994 the Huntley Factory Shops opened on 50 acres of land fronting the tollway; a factory-outlet mall stuffed with alleged bargains, it was the town’s first big hit and according to a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune signaled that the little town in south McHenry County was the new outer edge of the metropolitan area. Last fall a mammoth junior/senior high school opened west of town, serving the older half of a student body that’s doubled in the past four years. Subdivisions have mushroomed in neighboring Algonquin and Lake in the Hills–parts of which use the Huntley school system–and in Huntley itself, a housing developer is building 750 new homes just north of the business district. Two new factories, making Weber Grills and industrial fasteners, have sprouted north of the outlet mall, and nearby a complex of car dealerships opens this summer.
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But all of these projects will be dwarfed by Sun City, where ground is being broken for model homes and an 87,000-square-foot recreation center. The subdivision will occupy a parcel just over the county line in northern Kane County, land that Huntley annexed in 1992. According to David Schreiner, a vice president at Del Webb, homes will be priced from under $150,000 to about $300,000. Del Webb pioneered the notion of sunbird retirement towns; since 1960 it’s built 11 such subdivisions in warm locales like Phoenix, Arizona; Palm Desert, California; and Hilton Head, South Carolina. The various Sun Cities now house about 90,000 senior citizens in surroundings tailor-made for a modern version of retirement. Restaurants, golf courses, swimming pools, and hobby clubs for computer buffs and quilters make a Sun City development feel less like God’s waiting room than the first-class lounge on a long, leisurely ride into the sunset.
Jim Morbeck, a 64-year-old mechanical engineer from Cary, is thinking about buying a house in Sun City Huntley and recently visited two developments in Las Vegas. “It’s not a place for old fogies who want to sit around all day,” he reports. “Everything you need to be an active retiree is right there.” It’s an appealing lifestyle, “except you have to develop a whole new support group once you move out there–make new friends, get new doctors. You’ve left the kids and grandkids behind. And once you get out there, you might find out you don’t like being without seasons after all.” Anne Schaefer, a retired Catholic-school teacher who lives in Wheaton, is also considering a move to Sun City Huntley, but she agrees that sunbird retirement can be stressful: “I can remember my mom saying that she had known so many couples who moved to Florida, and then one or the other of the spouses would die and they’d be left there with no people they had known and loved around them. They can move back but it’s not the same.”
Of course it’s his job to say that. The real question, to be answered over the next 15 years, is whether Sun City will turn out to be the best choice for Huntley. “This is a great deal for Huntley,” Dhamer insists. “You can’t find anything to whine and cry about with this deal. What we’re going to get is a lot of taxes and fees from people who aren’t going to use the services their money is paying for. It’s the best kind of money to have.”
Meanwhile the outlet mall, near Sun City on the south side of town, anchors a blossoming retail district. The Prime Group, which sold Del Webb all but 100 acres of what will become Sun City, is hatching 240 acres of retail and medical offices immediately east of it across Highway 47. There’s even been talk of building an overpass or underpass that would allow the seniors to tool across the highway in their golf carts. In November another developer announced plans to build a complex of hotels, restaurants, and a movie theater on a 120-acre parcel that borders Sun City on three sides; his blueprint includes a central courtyard modeled after Woodstock’s town square.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos by Randy Tunnell.
