“Suburban Profile: Lombard, Illinois” by S.M. O’Connor

Lombard, Illinois is about twenty miles west of the Chicago Loop. Outside Lombard, to DuPage County residents newly arrived from Cook County, Lombard is best known as the home of Yorktown Center, but to Lombard residents, flower lovers, and longtime residents of neighboring towns, Lombard is best known for Lilac Time. This lilac-themed annual festival is held every May in Lilacia Park. Famous residents of Lombard include folk artist, abolitionist, temperance activist, and public education advocate Sheldon Peck (1797-1868); cartoonist Harold Gray (1894-1968), who co-created the comic strip Little Orphan Annie for the Chicago Tribune, wrote the strip, and illustrated it until his death;[1] Albert O. Hirschman Award-winning historian and sociologist Charles Tilly (1929-2008), who wrote Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990-1992; stage-and-screen star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who co-starred in Scarface (1983), The Color of Money (1986), The Abyss (1989), and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Hugo Award-winning science fiction novelist Timothy Zahn, who created the Star Wars villain Grand Admiral Thrawn and gave the name Coruscant to the capital planet of the Galactic Empire; and astronaut Daniel M. Tani. Founded in 1833, Lombard was originally known as Babcock’s Grove.[2] Brothers Ralph and Morgan Babcock settled in a grove of trees along the DuPage River and St. Charles Road.[3] Lombard and Glen Ellyn sprang up together as twin villages, with Lombard to the east and Glen Ellyn to the west.[4] The Babcock brothers were soon joined by Deacon Winslow Churchill, Elisha Fish, and Sheldon Peck. In 1834, the Churchills sold their property in New York for the Eerie Canal and moved to Babcock’s Grove.[5] The Churchills are considered the first landowners in Glen Ellyn.[6] The Babcock brothers moved on shortly after their arrival to establish other settlements farther west.[7] A tavern and schoolhouse soon appeared at Stacy’s Corners, where two American Indian trails intersected.[8] In 1837, a stagecoach line connected Babcock Grove’s to Chicago.[9] The stagecoach stopped at Stacy’s Tavern, which stood at the intersection of Geneva Road and St. Charles Road.[10] That same year, Sheldon Peck and Harriet arrived from Onondaga, New York.[11]

In 1836, Sheldon Peck, his wife, Harriet (1806-1887), and their children arrived in Chicago and purchased land.[12] The next year, Martha Peck, their seventh child and second daughter, was born, the Chicago banks failed, and the Pecks moved west.[13] In 1837, Peck claimed eighty acres east of the DuPage River, the eastern half of the northwest corner of Section 8 of York Township.[14] That same year, he built a one-room house.[15] This structure survived as a room of a larger 1 ½ -story timber frame house he completed in 1839.[16] In 1842, Peck purchased another eighty acres of land, which resulted in a property that, from above, would have looked like a backwards capital L.[17] The next year, John Peck (1825-1884), the eldest son of Sheldon & Harriet Peck, acquired twenty acres of land adjacent to the Peck Homestead.[18] After they arrived in Babcock’s Grove, Sheldon and Harriet had five more children: Henry Peck, born in 1839; Susan Elizabeth Peck, born in 1843; Abigail Peck, born in 1846; Sanford Peck, born in 1848; and Frank Peck (1853-1935), born in 1853.[19] In 1843, twenty children attended a school in the Peck house.[20] Peck paid the salary of teacher Almeda J. Powers.[21] On October 24, 1866, Charles Peck (1827-1900), the second son of Sheldon & Harriet Peck, wed Harriet Shotwell. [Charles Peck was a painter who had been a Union Army photographer during the Civil War.[22]] That same year, he and L.H. Ford founded the Chicago Academy of Design.[23] This organization was the forerunner of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, which later changed its name to The Art Institute of Chicago. In 1876, Harriet Peck platted the southwest corner of The Farm – forty acres of land – into nine lots she distributed amongst (some) of her children with a street that ran down the center.[24] This street became Hickory.[25] Only one of the children, Abigail Peck Castleman, and her husband, Levi, built a house at the intersection of Hickory and Main Street, and she was the only child of Sheldon & Harriet Peck to actually build a house on one of these lots.[26] In 1887, Harriet Peck died and Sanford and Frank Peck inherited The Farm.[27] In 1892, Sanford Peck sold sixty-six acres of land, and the next year Thomas W. Stewart acquired this property and platted it as the Tower Park subdivision.[28] In 1924, Frank Peck and his second wife, Ida, platted the remainder of The Farm.[29] They retained only four-and-a-half acres around the house.[30] Three years later, they sold off more land, which left a lot about the current size.[31] In 1935, Frank Peck died and his daughter, Alice Peck Mertz, inherited what remained of the Peck Homestead.[32] Her son, Allen Mertz, offered to sell the property to the Lombard Historical Society in 1996.[33] The Village of Lombard allocated $40,000 to help purchase the property.[34] The Lombard Historical Society owns and operates the Sheldon Peck Homestead at 33 East Parkside. Restoration of the property began in the spring of 1997.[35] The Lombard Historical Society dedicated the Sheldon Peck Homestead on August 26, 1999, and it opened to the public in 2000. In 2011, the National Park Service named the Sheldon Peck Homestead a Network to Freedom Site, a verified stop on the Underground Railroad.[36]

In 1849, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad began to send two trains each way per day through Babcock’s Grove, which (a) allowed farmers in the vicinity of Babcock’s Grove to send food to Chicago; (b) put the stagecoach line out of business; (c) stimulated the appearance of a hotel, post office, and general store near the train station.[37] [This railroad was intended to connect Chicago with the lead mines of Galena, Illinois, which is the county seat of Jo Daviess County, and is near the Mississippi River, the border between Illinois and Iowa. However, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad never actually built a station in Galena. This was Chicago’s first railroad. In 1848, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad’s steam locomotive called The Pioneer began to pull cars full of construction supplies for the railroad and thereby became the first train in Chicago or Cook County. The group of Chicago businessmen who founded the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad included William Butler Ogden (1805-1877), who had been Chicago’s first mayor, and Walter Loomis Newberry (1804-1868), the eponym of The Newberry Library. In 1864, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad was absorbed into the larger Chicago & North Western Railway System.] This also made it easier for German farmers to join the earlier settlers from New York and Yankees from New England.[38]

In 1868, Chicago banker Josiah Lombard acquired 227 acres of land.[39] Josiah Lombard, Sr. founded the Fifth National Bank and served as its first president.[40] In 1837, Josiah Lombard, Sr. had founded the Pike County Fire Insurance Company with partners Reuben Hatch; George W. Johnson; James A. Collins, James Hutchinson, Jr.; Ozias M. Hatch; Alexander Starne; Chatham French; John McCallister; Theodore Dickerson; James Wilson; Marshall Ayers; Dana Ayers; and Uriah Brown.[41] By 1872, Josiah Lombard, Jr. was in the oil refining business with partners Henry N. Rogers and F.C. Fleming.[42] By 1879, Josiah Lombard, Jr. and Marshall Ayers, Jr. had founded the firm Lombard & Ayers.[43] He was also on the Board of Directors of the Commercial Alliance Life Insurance Company.[44] Josiah Lombard, Sr. headed a group of investors who registered the first plat for Babcock’s Grove.[45] These real estate developers called for the town’s incorporation.[46] They hoped to establish a commuter suburb.[47] This was contemporaneous with the planned community of Riverside, Illinois, which is much closer to Chicago. This effort was also taking place at the same time as the foundation of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia. The name of Babcock’s Grove changed to Lombard in 1869.[48] Other prominent residents who encouraged the transformation of the rural village Babcock’s Grove into the railroad suburb Lombard were General Benjamin Sweet (1832-1874), the commandant of Camp Douglas – the Union Army training camp and prison camp on the estate of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas – and future Deputy Commissioner of the Internal Revenue, and William Rattle Plum (1845-1927), a former Union Army telegrapher and successful attorney in Chicago who had attended Yale Law School.[49] The name Lombard is closely associated with banking because bankers from Lombardy spread across Europe.

Lombard Street is a short street, just .16 of a mile long, in the City of London – not to be confused with Greater London, which surrounds it – and has been home to merchant houses, banks, and insurance companies for centuries. English journalist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), longtime Editor of The Economist, wrote Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, published in 1873. Wall Street is to New York City and La Salle Street is to Chicago what Lombard Street is to London. It began as one of the ancient Roman roads inside Londinium, the capital city of Roman Britain. According to The London Encyclopædia, Lombard Street has been a banking center since the arrival of “Lombard merchants from north Italy” in the 12^th Century.[50] The Caursini family of goldsmiths and bankers were the first family to settle here from Lombardy.[51] They and other members of the Lombard tribe are sometimes identified as Longobards in some old documents. Lombardy is one of twenty administrative region of the Republic of Italy, and Milan is its capital. Modern Lombardy is much smaller than the old Kingdom of the Lombards. Throughout Western Europe, banking families from Lombard became associated with charitable pawn shops the Catholic Church encouraged as an alternative to money lenders. Lombard North Central, now owned by The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, is a finance company in London that continues in the tradition of asset-based lending, meaning that a business must offer an asset as collateral on a loan before the finance company will loan that business money. One of the largest banks on the isle of Malta is Lombard Bank.

Dedicated on May 29, 1870 at a cost of $5,000, First Church of Lombard (now Maple Street Chapel) is a Gothic Revival-style building of frame construction that stands at the southwest corner of Maple Street and Main Street. The street address is 220 South Main Street. Originally, it was a Congregational church.[52] This was the fourth church building erected by the congregation since 1851 known as The Congregational Church of Babcock’s Grove. The south room of the church was used variously as a town hall, library, and movie theater. When Maple Street was paved in 1915, the north entrance was demolished and the current entrances were added. One church member, Josiah Reade, a graduate of Amherst who built a house in Lombard in 1905, established the first public library in Lombard in the First Church of Lombard. In order to share access to his large collection of books with his fellow townsfolk, he began to carry a basketful of books over to the church on a weekly basis. His collection of books formed the nucleus of the library collection. For about fifty years, Reade supervised the library. This became known as the Reade Room. The First Church of Lombard, as a congregation, now belongs to the United Church of Christ, which is an American, Protestant denomination that formed as a result of the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, also known as the German Reformed Church, and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches in 1957. They now hold services in an adjacent building that can hold 400 worshippers. Maple Street Chapel Preservation Society, Inc. maintains the old building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1880, Newell Mattson purchased property in Lombard and three years later built the house at 23 West Maple Street, which the Lombard Historical Society purchased in 1971. This became the Victorian Cottage Museum. In 1981, the Lombard Historical Society moved to this property the barn that had stood at 25 East Grove. In 1993, the Lombard Historical Society also moved to this property the garden house from Col. Plum’s estate, Lilacia.

The “milk stop” train station allowed for farmers to send food into Chicago and commuters to work in the city while dwelling in Lombard.[53] A cheese factory and creamery sprang up in Lombard, as well.[54] Famers and commuters came into conflict over the issue of temperance. Several times in the 19^th Century, the local temperance movement attempted to shut down saloons and failed, only to triumph in 1911.[55] The Town of Lombard, meanwhile, had reincorporated as the Village of Lombard in 1903.[56] Downtown Lombard is located north of Roosevelt Road and south of North Avenue.

The aforementioned Josiah Reade was an employee of the Chicago & North Western Railway System. He was the second President of the Village of Lombard. In 1905, he erected the wood clapboard house at 15 West Maple. The architect, Robert Spencer, Jr. received multiple suggestions about the design from Reade’s daughter, Christia. Miss Reade had studied the design of stained glass in Europe for two-and-a-half years, but she was better known for the design of silver jewelry, and had exhibited pieces at Chicago’s first World’s Fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893).[57] Josiah Reade died in 1929 at the age of ninety-nine, and to make the occasion the bell at First Church was rung ninety-nine times.

For over fifty years, between 1906 and 1957, the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railway provided interurban passenger service.[58] By 1920, Lombard’s population had increased to 1,331 people. In the decade that followed, Lombard became an increasingly attractive place to live because of the construction of a new high school, the paving of streets, and the development of the Lombard Park District.[59] The DuPage Theatre opened in 1928.[60]

On September 26, 1927, as a result of Plum’s bequest, the Lombard Park District was established by court order.[61] Originally, the official name Plum Memorial Park, but the public continued to call the park by the old name of Plum’s small estate, “Lilacia.”[62] William Ralph Plum, nephew of Col. Plum, headed the Lombard Park District, which solicited designs for Lilalcia Park from landscape architects.[63]

In May of 1928, the Lombard Park District Board accepted the design offered by Jens Jensen (1860-1951).[64] Jensen was one of the founding fathers of both the Chicago Park District and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.[65] Previously, he had designed the American Garden in Union Park (1888) in Chicago’s Near West Community Area, Garfield Park (1905) in East Garfield Park on Chicago’s West Side, the rose garden and boathouse in Humboldt Park (1905) in Humboldt Park on Chicago’s West Side, Washington Square Park (1906) on Chicago’s Near North Side, Franklin Park (1916) on Chicago’s West Side, Columbus Park (1920) in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, and Cragin Park (1921) in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side.[66] In 1895, the West Park Commission had promoted him to Superintendent of Union Park, and the next year appointed him to Superintendent of Humboldt Park, but dismissed him in 1900 because of his refusal to participate in graft, yet he remained a member of the Special Park Commission.[67] [The West Park District later merged with Chicago’s other park districts to form the Chicago Park District during the Great Depression.] Between 1906 and 1909, he had served as Superintendent and Landscape Architect of the West Park Commission.[68]

Between 1927 and 1929, the Lombard Park District acquired additional land for Lilalcia Park at an expense of $67,000.[69] Later, the Lombard Park District acquired three more acres of land west of Lilacia Park to add to it, which brought it to seven-and-a-half acres by 1958.[70]

The Lombard Park District board members had feared they could not afford Jensen’s services and asked how much he would charge.[71] He smiled and said he would do it for $600.[72] In July of 1928, the Lombard Park District commissioned Jensen, to create Lilacia Park.[73]

In March of 1929, a bond issue for the Lombard Park District of $118,000 carried.[74] Consequently, the Lombard Park District used $67,000 to purchase approximately three acres of land north of Lilacia Park.[75] The three properties, which now comprise roughly the northern half of Lilacia Park, were owned by three unrelated families.[76] One lot had a frame house, a second had a frame building that had formerly been the post office, and the third had a general store.[77] A year later, the Lombard Park District spent $50,000 to finance landscaping of Lilalcia Park and purchase ten acres of land that became Terrace View Park.[78] Later, the Lombard Park District acquired three more acres of land west of Lilacia Park to add to it, which brought it to seven-and-a-half acres by 1958.[79]

The Lombard Park District introduced Jensen to Lombard residents at a ceremony at Lincoln School on St. Charles Road on Friday, May 24, 1929.[80] The Lombard Park District renovated Col. Plum’s former coach house as the Lombard Park District Administration Building to become Jensen’s office and a meeting room for the board.[81] Jensen imported 40,000 tulip bulbs from The Netherlands for Lilacia Park and every year approximately 25,000 tulips bloom in Lilacia Park.[82] In 1929, he replanted Col. Plum’s 1,100 lilac bushes in new positions.[83] While the lilacs bloom over a three-week-long period every May, the more-brightly colored tulips bloom every spring from late April to mid-May.[84] Jensen also planted beds of native wildflowers to contrast the lilacs and tulips.[85] His plan called for a limestone bank with a built-in waterfall that would flow into a fishpond with lilies at its center.[86] A lawn where an audience could sit would be set below a greensward stage above this lily pond.[87] The Lombard Park District has replaced Jensen’s curved flagstone path with gravel.[88]

Lombard’s first Lilac Festival was held in 1929 and became an annual tradition every May.[89] The Lombard Junior Women’s Club sponsors the annual search for a Lilac Queen and her court of four Lilac Princesses.[90] The first Lombard Lilac Queen was Adeline Fleege, daughter of Dietrich & Matilda Fleege, the proprietors of Fleege Grocery Store.[91] The ladies of Lombard donated real silverware, specifically spoons, out of which the aforementioned Christia Reade fashioned a lilac-themed silver crown.[92] As tastes changed over the course 20^th Century, the crown Christia Reade made and others have been retired to the Lombard Historical Society.[93] Every year at Lilac Time, the museum displays the old crowns.[94]

Local authoress Katherine Reynolds was prevailed upon to write a play for the 1933 lilac pageant.[95] She was publisher of the town’s first newspaper, the Lombard Breeze, which began publication in 1912.[96] Her book Green Valley was a bestseller, as was her second book, Willow Creek.[97] Harriet Taylor directed the play the first time year it was performed.[98] The audience demanded an encore performance.[99] She was unavailable the second year, and Katherine Reynolds had to direct the play, which she had revised to add more characters.[100] Allan Hubbard was the first Lilac Prince.[101] In 1936, a parade replaced the pageants, and one of the floats that carried about a dozen young girls was named “Future Lilac Queens,” yet the town chose no Lilac Queens from 1937 to 1946 and the next parade would not be held until 1957.[102] The Lombard Chamber of Commerce and Industry introduced the Lilac Ball in 1959.[103]

In the 1930s, local artist Charles Medin, who lived with his wife and daughter in Lombard until his death in 1967, painted images for posters that promoted Lombard’s Lilac Festival, one of which depicted Plum house as the Helen M. Plum Memorial Library, screened behind a large tree. Medin was a sculptor, photographer, and painter who had studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and became the staff artist and assistant art director of the Illinois Central Railroad (I.C.R.) magazine where he regularly painted the magazine covers. An original Medin poster was recently offered for sale at a Chicago art studio for several thousand dollars. The Lombard Historical Society sold limited-edition, numbered museum-quality copies of three of Medin’s Lilac Festival posters for $10 (11” x 17”) or $50 (18” x 24”).

Lilacia Park is now a 5.89-acre community park. In 1958, Hubert E. Mogle, Secretary of the Lombard Park District since 1929, estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 people from all over the U.S.A. attended Lombard Time.[104] The next Lombard Lilac Time is May 4-20, 2018. This is a chance to see more than 700 lilacs and 25,000 tulips in Lilacia Park, the former estate of the aforementioned Col. Plum. The Lilac Time Arts & Crafts Fair will be in downtown Lombard, down the street from Lilacia Park, on Sunday, May 6, 2018 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The Lombard Park District Administrative Office building is at 227 West Parkside Avenue. This is the road that runs north of Lilacia Park, parallel with the train tracks (and Metra parking spaces). It is west of, and next door to, Lilalcia Park. In addition to Lilacia Park, the Lombard Park District also had the twenty-five-acre-Sunset Knoll Park, the thirty-acre Madison Meadow, the ten-acre Terrace View Park, the ten-acre Lombard Lagoon, and the forty-five-acre Lombard Common in 1958.[105] Today, in addition to Lilacia Park, the Lombard Park District has Babcock Grove Memorial Garden, a .48-acre mini-park; Broadview Slough, a 19.8-acre natural area; Crescent Tot Lot, A .75-acre mini-park; Eastview Terrace, a .53-acre mini-park; Edson Park, a .34-acre mini-park; Water Spray Park, a .25-acre mini-park; Lombard Lagoon, a 10.8-acre neighborhood park; Terrace View Park, a 48.7-acre community park; Vista Pond, a 10.8-acre neighborhood park; Lombard Common, a 49.3-acre community park; Westmore Woods, a 21.2-acre neighborhood park; Madison Meadow, an 86.7-acre community park; Old Grove, an 8.3-acre neighborhood park; Sunset Knoll Park, a 36.9-acre community park; Southland Park, a 15.6-acre neighborhood park; and Four Seasons Park, a 39-acre community park. Obviously, that means, in the intervening years, Sunset Knoll Park, Terrace View Park, and Lombard Common have grown quite a lot. The Lombard Park District also has Paradise Bay Water Park, south of St. Charles Road, in Lombard Common, and Western Acres Golf Course, north of Butterfield. Churchill Woods, which is part of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, lies between Lombard and Glen Ellyn.

There was a population boom in the wake of the Second Great World War.[106] In the 1950s, new homes and shopping malls were built. By 1960, the number of residents had reached 22,561.[107] In the 1970s, the seventy-five-acre Yorkbrook industrial park and the 200-acre Clearing Industrial Park opened.[108] Much as Lombard benefitted in the second half of the 19^th century and first half of the 20^th Century from having the railroad running through it – and still benefits from it – in recent decades it has also benefitted from Illinois Route 53 and I-355/Veterans Memorial Tollway winding through it on north-south routes, and three arterial roads running through it on east-west routes: North Avenue/Illinois Route 64, Roosevelt Road/Illinois Route 38, and Butterfield Road. Further, I-88/Reagan Memorial Tollway skirts along the southern border of Lombard. This web of tollways and arterial roads allow rapid travel by motor vehicles northward to the northern suburbs in Lake County, southward to the southern suburbs of Will County, eastward to Chicago (and its airports) in Cook County, and westward all the way to Utah. By 2000, Lombard had a population of 42,322 and by 2010 it had a population of 43,165.

Yorktown Center is 1,500,000-square-foot two-story enclosed shopping mall with an open-air component and a large strip mall, a movie theater, a big-box store, restaurants, and two hotels in out lots, which opened in 1968.[109] This shopping mall is in far southern Lombard. The anchors of the two-story enclosed mall are a three-story Carson Pirie Scott department store, a two-story J.C. Penney department store, and a three-story Von Maur department store. This Von Maur department store was formerly a Wieboldt’s department store and is the second-largest Von Maur store in the chain. A Montgomery Ward’s department store was formerly an anchor.[110] Around the turn of the century, Big Idea Productions, the company that produces the wholesome VeggieTales cartoons for Protestant families was headquartered in Yorktown Mall, but the company moved to Nashville in 2004. In 2006, the old Montgomery Ward’s department store was demolished to make way for an open-air concourse of stores opened known as The Shops at Butterfield.[111] In addition to the Carson Pirie Scott department store, there is a Carson’s Furniture Gallery in the strip mall in the northwestern corner of the property. [Update: Both the Carson Pirie Scott department store and the Carson’s Furniture Gallery closed in 2018.] Frankie’s Deli, which has been profiled on the W.G.N. television show Chicago’s Best, is also located in the strip mall. [Update: In 2019, Frankie’s Deli moved to 17W626 Butterfield Road, Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois 60181.] Years ago, the McDonald’s inside the mall food court closed and a new, retro-looking McDonald’s opened in an out lot near the strip mall, facing Highland Avenue. A Target Greatland store and a TownePlace Suites by Marriot hotel are in the northeastern corner of the property and are also accessible from 22^nd Street.

There is a Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse & Bar in The Westin Lombard Yorktown Center, an upscale hotel and convention center. The eighteen-story, 440,000-square-foot building has 500 guestrooms and suites, 55,000 square feet of meeting space (including the 18,915-square-foot Grand Ballroom), and a 635-space parking garage (in addition to 270 surface parking spaces). The Harry Carey Management Group operate a 10,000-square-foot Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse & Bar and a 6,000-square-foot Holy Mackerel! American Fish House. The first Harry Carey’s Restaurant opened in Chicago’s River North neighborhood in 1987, while the Holy Mackerel! American Fish House is the first of its kind. The Lombard Public Facilities Corporation owns this building. Westin Hotels & Resorts operates the hotel and convention center. The bonds will retire in 2034, at which point ownership of the hotel and restaurants will go to the Village of Lombard. This building and the Lindner Conference Center are on the eastern end of the property, behind two small lakes or large ponds.

There is an AMC Dine-In Yorktown 18 megaplex in the southeast corner of the property. General Cinema Corporation built this eighteen-theater cinema with seventeen stadium theaters and one Premium Theater, which opened in 1998, and AMC purchased General Cinema in 2002.[112] The Premium Cinema served full meals, which audience members ordered before the films are screened, the model for other restaurant-cinemas including Hollywood Blvd. Cinema and iPic Entertainment’s upscale iPic Theaters®. A few years ago, the Leopardo Companies demolished and renovated the auditoriums, lobby, washrooms, box office, and concessions for AMC. Leopardo upgraded all of the auditoriums by installing power recliner chairs with tables for casual dining, and building AMC Red Kitchen and the bar MacGuffins.

Other restaurants on the periphery include Claim Jumper® Restaurant & Saloon, Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, Buca di Beppo, and The Capital Grille. In April of 2012, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company and YTC Pacific purchased Yorktown Center for approximately $196,000,000.[113] Two years later, the food court underwent $14,000,000 in renovations.[114] The upgrades included the addition of 200 more seats, entertainment screens, work stations for customers to plug in laptop computers, and a family lounge.[115] The parking lot surrounds the old Boeger-Brinkman Cemetery on Butterfield Road. The Northern Baptist Theological Seminary is next door to Yorktown Center on Butterfield Road. Yorktown Center is surrounded by strip malls, free-standing restaurants, large furniture stores, banks, and office buildings in Lombard and Downers Grove. To the west, these taper off after the intersection of Butterfield Road and I-355. To the east, there is a continuous line of stores, restaurants, and office buildings along Butterfield and 22^nd Street/Cermak Road stretching to Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, which is something of an outer downtown for the Chicago area (like Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg). East of Oakbrook Center, there are more office buildings than stores. The largest malls in Lombard near Yorktown Center are Fountain Square of Lombard and the Highlands of Lombard.

Roosevelt Road and North Avenue also have many stores and office buildings. The two largest strip malls in Lombard on Roosevelt Road are High Pointe Centre and Lombard Pines. The latter is home to the Enchanted Castle Restaurant & Entertainment Complex. On North Avenue, between Rohlwing Road to the east and I-355 to the west, the 332,428-square-foot Landings of Lombard mall (formerly Northgate Plaza) is home to Restaurant Depot, a store that sells independent restaurants food, supplies, and equipment; King’s Hall Banquets; and The RoomPlace (formerly Harlem Furniture). This is the flagship The RoomPlace store as the company is headquartered in Lombard. It is called The RoomPlace Main Showroom.

Figure 1 Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: The Lombard Historical Society now has a window display in Yorktown Shopping Center.

[1] Harold Gray’s co-creator of Little Orphan Annie was Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946). Patterson was co-editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune with his first cousin, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick (1880-1955) from 1914 to 1925. Together, in 1919, Patterson and McCormick founded the New York Daily News. In 1925, McCormick became sole editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune while Patterson became sole editor and publisher of the New York Daily News. His sister, Eleanor Medill Patterson (1881-1948), edited the daily newspaper the Washington Herald for William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) from 1930 until 1939, when she purchased it, along with the nightly newspaper the Washington Times, from him. She then combined the two newspapers into the Washington Times-Herald.

[2] Elizabeth M. Holland, “Lombard, IL” in Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide. Edited by Ann Durkin Keating. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (2008), p. 200

See also Lombard Historical Society, Lombard’s Lilac Time. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing (2010), p. 7

[3] Holland, p. 200

[4] Holland, p. 200

[5] James Robinson, Lombard Historical Society, “Sheldon Peck and His Homestead: A Chronology of Dates,” p. 1

[6] Jane S. Teague, “Glen Ellyn, IL.” In The Encyclopedia of Chicago. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin King, and Janice L. Reiff, editors. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (2004), p. 337

[7] Lombard Historical Society, Images of America: Lombard’s Lilac Time. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing (2010), p. 7

[8] Teague, p. 377

[9] Holland, p. 200

[10] Holland, p. 200

[11] Holland, p. 200

[12] Robinson, p. 2

[13] Robinson, p. 2

[14] Robinson, p. 2