Heading north from Chicago, Waukegan is the very last city on the Lake Michigan shore before crossing into Wisconsin. I've been there, naturally. It's also Ray Bradbury's hometown, so just imagine that something wicked this way comes. :P
Some interesting things about this list...
- North Chicago is just south of Waukegan, and the two cities have always been paired together in directories.
- The 1925 directory also listed locations in Highland Park, Highwood, Lake Forest, and Libertyville, though this was a one-year-only fling and it's a stretch to count those towns as part of the city's metropolitan centre. Also, this introduces problems: Highwood locations weren't numbered, while Lake Forest addresses don't seem to jibe with the present street grid. But I included them anyway.
- The 600 block of McAlister Avenue appears to have had all its 1920s-1950s commercial development bulldozed away and replaced with residential homes. It's quite strange to compare listings of what used to be there to its present-day state!
- As alluded to in this thread a year ago, Kroger entered Waukegan and Chicago in the 1930s by purchasing the Consumers Sanitary Coffee & Butter chain. A brief period of co-branding followed.
- Kroger declined in the 1950s as Jewel emerged. Their exit from the market surely happened in either 1971 (as in Wisconsin) or 1973 (when the chain sold their last Cook County stragglers).
- I would have expected Waukegan to be a healthier market for National than some of their far-flung operations in Michigan and Indiana...but even so, they entered the 1960s with but a single store, dwarfed by Kroger, Jewel, A&P, and Co-Op.
- "Co-Op" is the Co-operative Trading Company of Waukegan and a constant throughout the 1925-1960 period. This page suggests that the chain originated in the Finnish immigrant community, while this document notes that the cooperative was both a grocer and a distributor of automotive supplies! In any case, they matched or led competitors in store count from 1946 to 1960 and were likely Waukegan's strongest grocer throughout this period.