Rob Sall and John Cunningham are on a mission to make Forest Park shine. They started Light Up Forest Park, a group dedicated to wrapping trees in holiday lights. It’s been a phenomenal success. This year, there are 170 lit trees in town. The effect is stunning and many take walks or drive slowly past the lit trees.
This all started in 2022, when the couple wrapped their parkway tree in red lights on the 1100 block of Beloit. The response was so positive, they started “Light up Beloit” in 2023. Lit-up trees lined both sides of that street. Traffic crawled as cars cruised through a wonderland of twinkling lights. The trees function as a draw for visitors to dine and shop in town.
Rob and John have been promoting community in their neighborhood ever since they moved here in 2016. Their first project was to beautify the corner of Beloit and Harvard. They found volunteers to help fill the planters on Harvard with milkweed and tulips. They also hand-built the Super Mario and Candyland displays to brighten up the space in front of Ed’s Way.
This desire to create community came from growing up in small towns. Rob is from Wausa, Nebraska, population 634, and John is from Holdridge, Nebraska, population 5,495. The couple met in Nebraska and moved to Chicago in 2003. They work full-time for an overseas corporation. They are also dedicated to helping neighbors connect.
Lighting up trees is one way neighbors can connect. It also helps residents fight the seasonal depression that settles in during the long, dark days of a Chicago winter. It encourages residents to engage with their neighbors, instead of going into hibernation.
The cost of lighting a tree is minimal. By using efficient LED bulbs, the cost of keeping the lights on from dusk to dawn is about 10 cents per day. Residents pick the color and how many trees they want to light. Some power 3-4 trees. Power cords are suspended above the sidewalk so they don’t interfere with pedestrians or snow-plowing Bobcats.
Volunteers started working in November to light the trees. It takes about 90 minutes to wrap a tree, depending on how many strands are used. Some trees have 100,000 lights. The lighted trees are attracting attention from other communities and putting Forest Park on the map.
Rob and John don’t mind coordinating the tree lighting on their own block but don’t have time for a village-wide effort. Next year, they hope to recruit volunteer block captains to be responsible for their own block. This will allow the lighted-tree movement to expand to more parts of town.
This idea of block captains reminded me that a woman from Forest Park is also using holiday lights to create community. Blanche Lukes left Forest Park in 1970, to move with her husband, Jerry, to Phoenix. She started a movement in Moon Valley for each house to display luminaria during the holidays. This year, 24,000 luminarias will be lit on Christmas Eve.
Blanche is 97 now and she and Jerry have been married for 66 years. She still recruits block captains, who are each responsible for 20 homes. The spectacle of luminarias in a Phoenix subdivision with no streetlights draws bumper-to-bumper traffic from all over the area. When I told her about Rob and John’s efforts to light trees, she said, “What a great gift to Forest Park.”
Coming of age in our small town inspired Blanche to create community in a sprawling Phoenix subdivision. Just as growing up in small Nebraska towns motivated Rob and John to make Forest Park shine.
