Though much has changed in a generation in Darien and Woodridge, a few things also have remained the same, officials and residents say.
“People plant their roots in Darien and then become committed to the community,” says Carmen Soldato, mayor since 1991. “We’re never hurting for volunteers or new community-service programs. Our residents are always there for us.
“I believe the strong level of involvement can be traced back to when there was only a handful of residents living here and people relied on each other. That community spirit just kept growing as people kept moving in.”
“We’re a bigger town (now), but we’re still a quiet family town,” says Jimmy Gianacakos, a Darien restaurant owner who also has lived in the town for 27 years. “It’s the sort of place where families spend a lot of time together and tradition is common. For example, a lot of our customers who are coming in here now with their kids used to come in here with their parents when they were kids.”
When Leon and Pearl Werch moved to Woodridge in June 1959, living in the community was “fairly much like living in the country,” recalls Leon Werch, 83.
After he and his wife laid sod in front of their home, cows from a farm across the street trampled it.
“It was sparsely populated out here-in fact, there were barely 400 people around, which is what it took to incorporate the village a couple months after we moved out here,” says Leon Werch, who was the first village president, serving for two years.
Today, there are easily 400 people living within a block or so of the cozy bilevel the Werches moved to, he estimates, and the closest farm is about a 20-minute drive away.
About 10 years after the Werches moved to Woodridge, Gianacakos opened the Royal Shield Restaurant at 7417 Cass Ave. For many years, his was the only family-oriented restaurant in that section of Darien.
Today, however, he estimates that there are “probably 100 dining options” within a mile radius of his establishment. “I’ve watched this town grow in leaps and bounds,” he says.
“This is no longer a tiny village, it’s a tiny city,” Werch says of Woodridge. “But it’s still a very family-oriented place where people care about where they live. We still have the same sort of involved, active people here that were here when my family first moved in.”
“For a younger community, we’ve been fortunate in that we have so much in place thanks to the involvement of our residents,” says Bill Murphy, who has been mayor of Woodridge since 1981. “Although many of our residents are fairly new, we have a significant amount of them taking part in community functions.”
“I was impressed with how friendly and open the people of this town were when I first got here,” says Susan Walker, who moved from Minneapolis to Darien a year ago with her daughter, Katie, 7, to live with her husband, Joe. The Walkers had met when Joe Walker made frequent visits to Minneapolis.
“People would actually come up and say, `We know you’re new here-how do you like it?’ ” Walker says. “They were genuinely concerned. It’s a very neighborly place.”
But though those who live and work in Darien and Woodridge consider their communities small towns, both municipalities healthy and growing populations.
Most of the towns’ population arrived in the last generation or so, with the bulk of the residents moving into the communities in the 1980s.
Darien officials estimate that the population there is at about 21,000, up from the 20,000 listed in the 1990 census. About 14,500 were listed in the 1980 census.
Woodridge has about 28,500 residents, according to a special census taken last year, up from about 24,000 in 1990. About 21,000 lived there in 1980, according to the census data.
Darien officials estimate that the town will have 1,000 or so additional residents in a decade or so, and Woodridge officials expect the village to top out at about 35,000 in the same period, officials say.
Woodridge incorporated as a village in 1959, Darien eight years later. “We are officially one of the youngest communities in DuPage County,” Soldato says.
The towns’ roots date to the first half of the 19th Century, when people came to work on creating the Illinois & Michigan Canal, a small, man-made waterway that linked Chicago to the Mississippi River.
In the mid-19th Century, a nearby east-west stagecoach trail brought the first European settlers-mostly farmers-to Darien and Woodridge.
In the late 1800s, the stagecoach trail was turned into a dirt road and then, in the 1920s, into the now-defunct U.S. Highway 66, which linked Chicago to the West Coast. A few small businesses opened their doors along the thoroughfare in the first half of the century, bringing new neighbors to the farmers.
After World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission and the University of Chicago opened the Argonne National Laboratory nuclear research center to the south of Darien and Woodridge, bringing thousands of employees into the area over the next several decades.
This influx raised the population of Woodridge from a few dozen to a few hundred by the time longtime residents such as Werch settled there.
“We felt we were somewhat pioneers,” says Werch, who raised two daughters in Woodridge. “We were the second house to be occupied on our street, and this was the only street of houses in the village. Then, people started trickling into the town not long after we incorporated.”
Shortly after the Werches moved into the community, state officials began constructing Interstate Highway 55 over the now-defunct Illinois & Michigan Canal. It connected Darien and Woodridge-then considered far southwest suburbs-to Chicago and the other expressway. The highway led to the construction of hundreds of homes and the arrival of thousands of people in the towns.
“The highway is what brought people in droves to our community, and after several decades, I-55 is still a catalyst for growth here,” says Janet Tunget, president of the Darien Chamber of Commerce. “It defined us.”
The towns’ most recent growth spurt is being attributed to the opening of Interstate Highway 355, which connects I-55 to Interstate Highway 88 and Interstate Highway 290 to the north. Plans call for the highway, which runs through Woodridge, to be extended to connect to Interstate Highway 80 to the south; work is expected to begin late this year or early in 1996 and take two years, according to a spokesman of the Illinois Toll Highway Authority.
“The easy access of the I-355 extension makes Woodridge and Darien great markets for development,” says Peter Martin, a part owner in the Seven Bridges Ice Arena, an indoor ice skating facility that opened in September in Woodridge.
“You can now get here from anywhere in the Chicago area,” says Martin, whose facility is part of the Seven Bridges planned community, which will be mostly residential, being built at Hobson Road and Illinois Highway 53. “Plus, the communities have done a good job in creating the right infrastructure for development.”
“The tollway made our town and others nearby more accessible places to live,” says Tom Hackett, president of the Woodridge Chamber of Commerce. “You can now work about anywhere you’d like in the Chicago area and live here.”
With the rapid growth of the last 10 years, leaders say, the towns’ identities are changing from growing communities to maturing communities.
“The focus now turns from growth to maintenance,” Mayor Soldato of Darien says. “We want to keep the town viable and attractive not only for any new residents but for those who have been in the towns for decades.” He says the town will work on managing the remaining open land, maintaining housing stock and keeping the community safe through policing.
“We’ve been working to maintain that charm that was here when I moved in,” says Murphy, a Woodridge resident since 1968. “And I think we’ve been successful at that. Very few people leave here after moving in.
“We’re striving to maintain a balance of our green space and our developed land. . . . And we’ll pay more attention to that as the community gets older.”
“When we had the village’s 35th anniversary last year, we had a room full of original residents at that celebration who were still living here,” Werch says. “Not only did they stay, but many of their children have remained in the village as well.
“This is what’s remarkable about this place. It’s a place that people like to call their home. And they work hard to keep it a place they can call home.”
