Schaumburg may be well-known for Woodfield Mall but the Chicago suburb was helped on the path to becoming an edge city (see Joel Garreau’s 1991 book) when Pure Oil relocated from downtown Chicago to fields near Schaumburg in the late 1950s:

Frandsen knows it all started nearly 15 years earlier with the construction of the Pure Oil building on the opposite side of Golf Road — the same building that’s now Roosevelt University’s Schaumburg campus…

Though a corporation’s move from the city to the suburbs is a scenario that’s been repeated many times since, one difficulty at the time was establishing a fair and true price for land that had previously been purely agricultural, Frandsen said.

Along with the company’s move came its employees’ relocation to the suburbs as well. Frandsen and his growing family moved to Arlington Heights, one of the nearest residential areas to the office site which was then in unincorporated Palatine Township.

Unlike today, when the one-story building crouches behind a taller strip mall to the south and IKEA to the north, Pure Oil’s headquarters sat like an island among the fields that continued to be leased to farmers.

It is critical to remember that the post-World War II suburbanization boom in the United States wasn’t just about people moving to the suburbs: many businesses relocated as well. Businesses moved for a variety of reasons including being closer to employees, finding cheaper land and lower taxes, wanting to have more “campus-like” developments, and being closer to the homes of executives.

If Pure Oil really did help kickstart the corporate boom in Schaumburg, this story doesn’t sound too different than that of Naperville where the opening of a Bell Labs facility in the mid 1960s along the relatively new East-West Tollway led to a number of other firms also locating nearby. Both Pure Oil and Bell Labs were originally outside of municipal boundaries and were eventually brought into city limits through annexation. Both Schaumburg and Naperville were already communities prior to the coming of these firms and the arrival of new kinds of businesses pushed community leaders to pursue new opportunities. This shift toward office space and white-collar jobs transformed both suburbs.