Bolingbrook history

Located in Will County (about 30 miles southwest of Chicago), Bolingbrook is one of Chicago's most desirable suburbs. With its beautiful streets, parks and real estate, Bolingbrook is the ideal place to start a family.

The town of Bolingbrook, Illinois first emerged in the 1960s, on somewhat shaky ground. You see, it all started when the Dover Construction Company began advertising its brand new 'Bolingbrook Subdivision' to Chicago families, soon after the Stevenson Expressway (I-55) had been completed. The new highway provided a quick and easy means of commuting to and from Chicago, so folks were enticed to live outside the city and drive in for work. The promised subdivision, however, wasn't as some homebuyers might have hoped. Many families were conned into purchasing homes that were sold (to their dismay) with unfinished, cement floors and treeless dirt lawns on unpaved roads. Hardly the idyllic setting associated with Bolingbrook today.

Just a year after the Stevenson Expressway was completed the village of Bolingbrook was officially incorporated in 1965 and three separate subdivisions owned by Dover were joined. In the first few years before its incorporation, a church and a grocery store had been built in the town, but little else. By the late '60s, though, a couple of restaurants had popped up, and in 1970 the Bolingbrook Park District was established. After a short decade of steady land acquisition the park district was named the best in the country.

By 1971, a new wave of subdivision development and home construction had begun at breakneck speed. At least five new subdivisions were built in Bolingbrook in the span of about three years, making Bolingbrook one of the fastest-growing Chicago suburbs. In 1974, the Bolingbrook High School opened, and the following year a library and a community center were added to the village. Also that year, the Old Chicago amusement park - the world's first all-indoor theme park - was built. Old Chicago was so popular the first few weeks it was open, traffic through Bolingbrook was a continuous nightmare, as the park attracted around 50,000 visitors each weekend. Alas, even with such a strong initial reception, the entertainment mecca announced bankruptcy within two years, and by 1980 it was forced to close.

Over the course of the 1970s, Bolingbrook's population quadrupled to nearly 40,000 in 1980. During the same period, the town greatly expanded its physical boundaries to accommodate the growing number of residents. Village infrastructure and schools caught up with the expansion in the 1980s and the population leveled off. Then, perhaps in response to recent improvements, another large wave of newcomers moved to the Bolingbrook suburb in the 1990s, nearly doubling its populace again.