To passers-by, Franklin Park doesn’t look like much: A bunch of train tracks, a seemingly endless industrial park and the increasingly crazed traffic of Grand Avenue, all interspersed haphazardly with blocks of economical single-family housing.
The storefronts are strictly budget, the eateries non-air-conditioned and indistinct, the cars mostly American-made and the people untrendy. It’s just incredibly average, the stuff of songs like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.”
And that’s exactly what’s appealing about Franklin Park, according to its residents.
“There isn’t a heck of a lot going on, so it seems like a nice little town,” explains Marian Faro, 69, an agent with Century 21 Atlas Real Estate and president of the Franklin Park Chamber of Commerce.
Faro and her husband have lived in Franklin Park for 37 years, and her children still live within five minutes of the village. “I couldn’t pry my husband out of here,” she notes. “He loves his home.”
Above all, Franklin Park is a place where family and community are important-perhaps by default, because what else is there?-but that’s the lure, the reason that young couples still look to the village when they are seeking lower-cost family homes within 20 miles of Chicago.
Franklin Park is named for Lesser Franklin, who, in 1892, left the Minnesota real estate market to discover this area, about 18 miles northwest of the Chicago Loop. Even before his naming of the town, it was a vision-in-waiting, with the Des Plaines River, Belmont Avenue and two railroads running through it.
With these assets in mind, Franklin swept through the area, buying four farms, creating a train depot and naming it all for himself.
Had Franklin lived a few hundred years, this may have ended up as quite a show town. The entrepreneur had a flair for entertainment and salesmanship. He paid for train excursions for prospective buyers and offered free beer, barbecued steers, balloon rides and pavilion dances to get people into his town.
And it worked. Lots sold for $150 to $400, and visitors were plentiful, filling the Franklin Park Hotel even before it was completed. More than a million dollars worth of lots were sold and, within two years of Franklin’s arrival, the residents of his village voted to incorporate.
Throughout the early 1900s, Franklin Park remained a mix of farms and small industry, growing gradually to 2,000 people. The railways began bringing in industry to the area and, after World War II, the growing highway system also brought in dozens of industries, the apex being in 1962 with the opening of nearby O’Hare International Airport.
By 1970, Franklin Park reached its highest population, 20,500, which since has dropped to 18,485, according to the 1990 Census. The drop is attributed to the loss of some manufacturing plants and the end of housing construction because of lack of available land.
Currently, the village is expecting a growth in population thanks to the many young couples who have recently purchased homes there and are starting families.
“We had a little reduction of population in the ’80s because so many of our children were putting off having children,” notes Mayor Jack Williams, a pharmacist who has spent 40-some years in Franklin Park, 25 of them as mayor.
“Now those clocks are ticking and I think we’re going to have a little population boom,” Williams adds. “I’m starting to see women with babies again, a lot of them.”
In recent years, Franklin Park has seen an upswing in the number of young adults, both single and married, buying homes and settling down in the village, Williams says.
“It’s kind of a recycling,” he says. “The village provides well for the elderly with a senior building with 127 apartments, and so many of the people who want to stay living here but no longer want to keep up their homes move into the senior building and put their homes on the market for young families.
“It works out really well because the seniors have their needs met and can stay in their hometown, but the young people have more affordable homes available to them.”
And village real estate agents say they are seeing more single adults becoming homeowners.
“People are waiting longer to get married, and (mortgage interest) rates are fantastic right now, so it’s getting a lot more frequent for single people to buy houses,” Faro notes.
For single homeowners without significant others, Franklin Park offers few places to meet mates other than at the Jewel or Kmart.
“I stay in town once in a while, and there aren’t a lot of places to go as far as nightlife,” notes Don Schottland, 52, who rents a business warehouse in the village. “Up and down Mannheim Road you have a lot of joints, bars, but they aren’t refined establishments-in fact, they’re pretty rough. But it’s a light industrial town; it doesn’t have a lot of refined nightclubs or upscale restaurants.”
Despite its lack of nightlife (“There’s maybe a neighborhood bar where you can sing karaoke,” Faro says), Franklin Park is attractive to young adults for several reasons, the foremost being the price of homes, low property taxes and the number of jobs available in local industry.
“Franklin Park gives you a good home for the price of the money,” notes Wayne Giese, 48, sales manager at Century 21 RCA Realty. “Most people work in the surrounding area. The people grew up here and they like the town and want to stay. It’s a very comfortable town to live in.
“You’re also centrally located by all expressways, and the park district offers a lot of activities, including water slides and a year-round ice-skating rink.”
“It’s a good place for families to get a start and move up within the village,” said Scott Dary, broker manager at Prudential Gladstone Realtors. “There’s a good turnover of homes. There’s an abundance of ranch-style brick homes, and it’s lower priced than most of the surrounding communities.”
Dary, 36, has lived in Franklin Park all of his life and is raising his family there. “I loved it here when I was growing up. It’s a real classic, blue collar-style town and most of the friends I grew up with are still here. I think that’s kind of unusual in this day and age.”
This unusual loyalty is a result of the residents’ pride in their town, Dary and other residents say. “If you grow up here, you want to raise your family here. There’s just good family values in this town,” he said. “It’s a well-established area-101 years old this year-and residents take pride in the area.”
Although neighbors are now less likely to talk over the fence as they hang the wash than they were in the ’50s, there are certain events in Franklin Park that get everyone together, including Oktoberfest, Fourth of July fireworks, a late summer carnival, Taste of Franklin Park and regular street dances and free concerts at the gazebo outside the village hall.
“Any day of the week, I go into a local restaurant and I’ll see a half-dozen people I know,” Faro says. “It always gives me a warm feeling to live in a town where everybody knows you. . . . In a town that’s too big, you never find that neighborliness.”
Last July, the village celebrated its centennial, which prompted former residents to return from around the country. More than 400 villagers volunteered to organize the 10-day party. Many of the residents spent months preparing costumes to help them better resemble villagers of the late 19th Century.
But Franklin Park is not without its problems, although the villagers say they easily overlook the few inconveniences they are willing to cite.
“You always hear one negative, and that’s getting stuck by the trains,” Faro says. (Metra, Canadian Pacific, Indiana Harbor and Wisconsin Central trains all run through the village.) “You can’t get across town because of the trains. But I figure, hey, this was a train town-and no matter where you go, you find something negative.”
Besides, she notes, an underpass is being planned for Grand Avenue that will eliminate that problem.
Schottland is a little less optimistic. “The trains are enough to make me seriously consider moving my business out of town,” he says. “And that talk of that underpass business has been going on so long I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen.”
Another complaint concerns the sewer system, which is being overhauled.
“When I first moved here 40 years ago, the flooding was very bad,” notes Delores Wisniewski, 65. “After a heavy rain, we would see boats on the street.”
The flooding resulted from the overflowing Des Plaines River and Silver Creek, as well as the early village sewers, which combined sewer and drainage systems. Now, sanitary sewers are being separated and updated as part of a $40 million project.
“We passed the whole thing by referendum, which is unusual nowadays,” Williams notes. “I put the cards down on the table and noted our problem with flooding and asked that we fix it as painlessly as possible.”
Any expansions besides sewer work, however, will be limited to industry. Housing is “built to the hilt,” according to Dary. Some of the larger companies have the room and dollars to expand, though.
“We are the fourth-largest industrial town in the state,” Williams explains, referring to a recent Illinois State Chamber of Commerce report that counts the number of industries per area. “It’s Chicago, then Rockford, Elk Grove Village and then Franklin Park. We were No. 3, but Elk Grove Village had the cornfields to expand into, whereas we are sort of landlocked.”
Projects under way include one at Quasar/Panasonic, which is undergoing a $50 million expansion expected to bring in 800 jobs by 1995, and one at Jewel Food Stores, which is building a refrigerated warehouse. Readi-Cut Co. recently held the grand opening for its six-acre operation in Franklin Park, which combined its former operations in Rosemont and Bensenville.
“That’s another 300 jobs, too,” Williams notes. “The industry has changed over the years, from the heavy foundries we had in the ’30s and ’40s to the food processing like Dean Foods, Brooklyn Bagel Boys and C.P.C. Foods and high-tech industries such as R.D. Warner Co., Castle Metals Co., Chicago Communications and Champion Electronics we have now.”
Almost 24 percent of residents work in clerical positions, with the next-highest percentages being in production or repair, 16.4 percent; machine operation, 15 percent; and sales, 8 percent.
The industries also provide Franklin Park with lower property taxes and more services than most suburbs, Williams says. “We have a 50-person full-time police force and a 50-person full-time fire team with three fire stations, all because of our large industrial base, which we also have a responsibility to protect.”
“Normally, it’s hard to find good people to work for you,” says Schottland, who employs two people at his warehouse. “That’s not true here. There are many people available here because the average working person can afford to live here, so you can find our type of employee more so than in the fancy suburbs.”
According to Schottland and others who work and live in Franklin Park, the village gets its livability from three main factors: the bustling industry, the economic value of the homes, the easy access to the city and the people and their community spirit.
“When I first came here, Franklin Park was just a place on the map,” Schottland says. “But I’ve met a lot of nice people here and I see the way the community is structured to serve the individuals and their investment. It’s a solid home, a solid community and you don’t have to pay through the nose for it.
“Now, I think of it as a nice place on the map.”
