Drive north on Milwaukee Avenue toward the Glenview line and the signage starts to change. A Korean BBQ house here, a tofu specialist there, a banner in hangul over a strip-mall bakery. The Koreans in Glenview, Illinois did not arrive in one wave or settle behind one gate. They came up the road from Chicago, a generation at a time, chasing the schools, and they brought Seoul Drive north with them.
The Place
Glenview sits about fifteen miles north of downtown Chicago, in Cook County, on land that was once prairie and oak along the North Branch of the Chicago River. The Metra commuter line that runs through its centre is the same set of tracks, laid after the Chicago Fire of 1871, that turned a railway crossroads into a town.
For most of the twentieth century the defining feature here was military. Naval Air Station Glenview, opened by the Navy in 1937, became the largest primary flight training base in the country during the Second World War, where nearly 9,000 cadets earned their wings. The base closed in 1993, and the village bought the land and built The Glen, a 1,121-acre district of homes, shops and a town centre.
It is, by any measure, an affluent North Shore suburb. Median household income runs well above six figures, the housing is comfortable, and the public schools are the kind people relocate across state lines to reach. That last fact is the whole story of how the Koreans got here.
How It Became Korean
To understand Korean Glenview you have to start in Chicago, fourteen miles south, in a neighbourhood called Albany Park.
Lawrence Avenue and the first Koreatown
Korean immigration to Chicago was almost nonexistent before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted the old quotas. In 1960 the city counted roughly 500 Koreans. The professionals and students who arrived after 1965 first settled in Lakeview, then moved northwest into Albany Park, where vacant storefronts and cheap rents along Lawrence Avenue let them open groceries, restaurants, bakeries, insurance offices and travel agencies.
The growth was steep. By 1980 Chicago’s Korean population had roughly doubled to 22,000, and by 1990 it reached around 35,000. In 1993 the city installed honorary “Seoul Drive” signs along a fourteen-block stretch of Lawrence Avenue, a formal acknowledgement of what everyone already knew. For a couple of decades the avenue was the centre of Korean Chicago: the place you went for a remittance transfer, a Korean-language newspaper, a wedding hall, a church basement supper.
The exodus north
There is a cruel timing to those signs. By 1992, the year before the plaques were bolted up, more than 22,000 of the city’s roughly 36,000 Koreans had already moved out to the northwest suburbs. The Koreatown on Lawrence Avenue was being honoured precisely as it emptied.
The reason was almost entirely education. Korean parents, many of them first-generation immigrants who had staked everything on their children’s prospects, wanted suburban schools. Korean-owned businesses in Albany Park fell from 428 in 1991 to 158 in 1997, and to about 50 by 2014, as the families and the storefronts followed the second generation outward.
They fanned out across the north and northwest, a movement documented in the city’s own archives and oral histories: Skokie, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles, Northbrook, Wheeling, Glenview. Niles became the commercial anchor, the place where you went to shop and eat. Glenview and Northbrook became where you wanted to raise the kids. The split was practical. The retail and restaurant density stayed close to the old corridor along Golf Road and Milwaukee Avenue, where rents and parking made sense, while the families themselves kept pushing into whichever suburb had the better elementary district.
Why Glenview specifically
Glenview offered the combination Korean families were optimising for: top-tier public schools, safe neighbourhoods, and proximity to the Korean commercial corridor along Milwaukee Avenue and Golf Road. A family could buy a house in a strong school district and still be ten minutes from a Korean grocer, a Korean church and a Korean spa.
Today Glenview is home to roughly 2,500 Koreans, the second-largest Korean population of any single municipality in Illinois after Chicago itself, and they make up well over two percent of the village, a share far above the state and national averages. The institutions arrived with the people. The Korean American Association of Chicago, the umbrella body for the whole metro Korean community, now lists its office on Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview rather than in the old city Koreatown.
The pattern is the familiar one of an immigrant community that succeeded itself out of the central city, and it rhymes with how the Jewish families of neighbouring Northbrook built their own North Shore enclave around the same schools and the same impulse.
The Landmarks
H Mart, 3385 N. Milwaukee Avenue. The Glenview branch of the Korean-American supermarket giant is the everyday heart of the community: banchan refrigerators, a fish counter, towers of instant noodles and a steady current of Korean grandparents and young families. It is smaller than the cavernous Niles flagship, but it is the one that is genuinely in Glenview.
Super H Mart, 801 Civic Center Drive, Niles. A short drive south, this is the regional megastore where Glenview Koreans do the big weekly shop. The food court alone, with its bibimbap, bulgogi and stone-bowl orders, functions as an informal community canteen.
King Spa & Sauna, 809 Civic Center Drive, Niles. Next door to Super H Mart sits one of the largest Korean jjimjilbang in the United States, complete with a fire sudatorium and bul gama kilns. For the Korean families of Glenview it is a weekend ritual: the bathhouse, the heated jade rooms, the sikhye in the relaxation hall.
So Gong Dong Tofu & BBQ, 1615 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Glenview. A soft-tofu and barbecue specialist on the Milwaukee Avenue strip, the kind of place where the soondubu jjigae arrives still boiling and the tabletop grills run late into the evening. It anchors the cluster of Korean restaurants that has grown up near The Glen.
Gopchang Story Korean BBQ, 1735 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Glenview. A Chicago outpost of a Korean chain devoted to gopchang, the grilled-intestine dishes that signal a serious, homesick crowd rather than a tourist one. Its presence on the strip is a marker of how dense and confident the local Korean dining scene has become.
Korean American Association of Chicago, Milwaukee Avenue, Glenview. The civic anchor. Founded to serve the entire metro Korean population, the association handles everything from elections coverage and citizenship help to the annual community events, and its move to Glenview tracks the community’s own centre of gravity shifting north out of the old city Koreatown.
Glenbrook South High School, 4000 W. Lake Avenue, Glenview. Not a Korean institution, but in a real sense the reason for all the others. Consistently ranked among the top twenty public high schools in Illinois, with a student body that is now around forty-five percent minority and heavily Asian, it is the school that drew Korean families up Milwaukee Avenue in the first place.
Where They Came From
Glenview’s Koreans came in two journeys, one across the Pacific and one across Cook County.
The first leg, for the older generation, ran from South Korea after 1965, overwhelmingly from Seoul and the major cities, and overwhelmingly professional: doctors, engineers, pharmacists, small-business owners and the students who stayed. This was not a refugee migration but an aspirational one, made by people who arrived with credentials and a plan.
The second leg ran from Albany Park. Most Glenview Korean families, or their parents, lived first in the city Koreatown along Lawrence Avenue, ran or worked in its businesses, and then moved north once the children reached school age. The diaspora map points back to Seoul, but the Chicago map points back to Lawrence Avenue, the way the Koreans of Los Angeles trace their own arc out from Olympic Boulevard.
Glenview Today
Korean Glenview is not a Koreatown in the visible, signage-dense sense of Annandale, Virginia or Fort Lee, New Jersey. There is no single boulevard you could photograph and caption. It is a residential and quietly commercial community, spread across good neighbourhoods, defined less by streetscape than by institutions: the churches on Sunday, H Mart on Saturday, the spa on the weekend, the test prep and Korean-language schools after class.
The numbers tell the same story the storefronts do. According to the village’s published demographic figures, Glenview is now around sixteen percent Asian, the second-largest group after white residents, and Korean households are a substantial share of that. In a generation the community went from a handful of pioneering families to a presence woven through the schools, the parks and the shopping strips.
The community is also genuinely cross-municipal. A Glenview Korean family shops in Niles, worships at a church that might sit in Wheeling or Morton Grove, and gathers at events run by an association whose office happens to be in Glenview. The Korean North Shore behaves as one region with several postcodes.
What it is, above all, is settled. The second and third generations have moved fully into American professional life while the Milwaukee Avenue restaurants, the grocers and the churches hold the cultural ground. The honorary signs may still hang on a fading stretch of Lawrence Avenue, but the living centre of Korean Chicago moved north years ago, and a good deal of it landed in Glenview.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Glenview, Illinois?
Glenview is home to roughly 2,500 Korean residents, making it the second-largest Korean population of any municipality in Illinois after Chicago. Koreans make up well over two percent of the village, a share noticeably higher than the Illinois and national averages.
Why did Koreans move to Glenview?
The main driver was schools. Korean families who had built Chicago’s Koreatown along Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park moved to suburbs like Glenview from the 1980s onward to put their children into top-ranked public schools such as Glenbrook South, while staying close to the Korean grocers and churches along Milwaukee Avenue.
Where is the Korean part of Glenview?
There is no single Koreatown street. The commercial heart runs along Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview, where you find H Mart and several Korean restaurants, with the larger Korean shopping district just south in Niles around Civic Center Drive and Golf Road.
Is there an H Mart in Glenview?
Yes. There is an H Mart at 3385 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview, a smaller everyday branch, while the regional Super H Mart megastore sits a short drive south at 801 Civic Center Drive in Niles.
How are the Koreans in Glenview connected to Chicago’s old Koreatown?
Directly. Most older Korean families in Glenview lived first in the original Koreatown along Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, where the city installed honorary “Seoul Drive” signs in 1993. As families moved north for schools and space, the businesses, churches and even the Korean American Association of Chicago followed them out to the suburbs.
What Korean churches and institutions serve the Glenview area?
The Korean North Shore is served by numerous Korean Presbyterian, Methodist and other churches across Glenview and neighbouring Niles, Morton Grove, Northbrook and Wheeling, along with the Korean American Association of Chicago, whose office is now located on Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview.
If your family’s story passed through Glenview, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a flight out of Seoul after 1965, to a storefront on Lawrence Avenue, to a house near Glenbrook South, to wherever you are now.