Naperville

Naperville surprised us. Lia and I had pictured a typical Chicago suburb, all strip malls and cul-de-sacs, but what we found instead was a downtown built deliberately and successfully around water. The Riverwalk, a nearly two-mile path of brick bridges, gardens, and quiet coves along the DuPage River, began in the 1980s as a community bicentennial project and has since become the town’s genuine heart, threading past a century-old millrace and a formal rose garden that was in full, fragrant bloom when we visited.

The Riverwalk and downtown

We spent a full afternoon simply walking the Riverwalk, crossing its arched brick bridges, watching paddleboats circle the small central pond, and stopping at the Millennium Carillon, a 160-foot bell tower whose observation deck gives a surprisingly good view over the whole town. Downtown Naperville sits just steps away, its Main Street and Jefferson Avenue lined with restored 19th-century buildings now holding boutiques, breweries, and a dense cluster of restaurants that felt more Chicago-neighborhood than suburban strip. We had dinner on a rooftop patio overlooking the river, watching the light fade behind the old water tower.

Naper Settlement and local history

The next morning we visited Naper Settlement, an open-air history museum of relocated 19th-century buildings — a log cabin, a blacksmith shop, a Victorian-era church — that traces the town’s founding by Joseph Naper in 1831. It’s a small, well-run museum rather than a major attraction, but it gave useful context for a town that’s grown, almost unrecognizably, from a frontier trading post into one of Illinois’s largest and most consistently ranked “best places to live.” Naperville’s ambition shows in small ways: a genuinely good downtown farmers market, an active theater scene, and a public library system locals talk about with real pride.

Getting There

Naperville sits about thirty miles west of downtown Chicago, easily reached by car via I-88 in normal traffic, or by Metra commuter rail’s BNSF Line, which runs directly from Chicago’s Union Station to downtown Naperville in under an hour. Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports are both roughly forty minutes away by car, making Naperville a practical, less expensive base for visitors splitting time between the city and its western suburbs.