A waiting-to-be-demolished home in Bensenville, Ill. Photo by John Crouch.

Olympic fever is leading suburban communities known for squabbling with
the city to set aside hostilities and declare their support for the
2016 bid. More than half of the 273 municipalities surrounding Chicago,
147 so far, have passed resolutions in support of Chicago's 2016
Olympic bid, according to the Metropolitan Mayor's Caucus.

This includes even communities like Elk Grove Village, which has been fighting with the mayor over O'Hare expansion for years.

Notably absent from the pile-on?

Bensenville, whose Village President John Geils had some choice words for the Tribune:

"Our issues are trying to survive," Geils said. "For us to get out
front and support the Olympics, I don't think it would be in our
interest. We're concentrating on how to provide the same quality of
life to our residents. It's very difficult to think about something as
esoteric as the Olympics when we're worried about garbage collection."

 Read More

Bensenville's lawyers managed to wrangle a 30-day delay out of the same judge who last week granted th City of Chicago permission to demolish more than 500 homes and businesses in the village according to WGN:

Popejoy, who last week ruled that Chicago could
begin demolition of the properties, said that he was issuing the order
to allow attorneys for Bensenville to file an appeal with the 2nd
District Illinois Appellate Court of his ruling.

Popejoy said that he was confident that his ruling last week was
correct , "but Bensenville deserves the chance to appeal. But the delay
granted by me ends on Sept. 10 and any further delay will be up to the
appellate court."

Popejoy denied a request from Chicago attorneys that the city be
allowed to erect fencing on the site on the eastern side of Bensenville.

"You can prepare your bids, but no on-site activity is to occur," Popejoy said.

Joseph Karaganis, attorney for Bensenville, said they plan to file an
appeal but no time table had been set. "But we are under the gun," he
said.

 Read more here

For those into adding a spatial dimension to a story, I've created a custom Google map that contains all the points highlighted so far on the blog along with links back to the relevant images on the Citizen.

Enjoy this other way to get into the Bensenville story.

View Larger Map

Visitors to the map (link above) can comment, vote and suggestion improvements to it.  Feel free to do any or all those tasks.

Bensenville's Acquisition Area also includes several businesses in addition to the more than 500 homes that have been bought up by the City of Chicago.  Most of these businesses are along Irving Park Road and they're just as boarded-up as the homes are.  Let's take a look:

All photos by Jing Zhou.

#1 We'll Fix Your Transmission

Photo by Jing Zhou.

Corner of Irving Park Road and Orchard Avenue: According to a sign nearby, this used to be an Auto Transmission place.(Google Map)

Resembling a set from a zombie movie or a fake town from a 1950s nuclear testing site, Bensenville, Ill., is a partially abandoned village just west of Chicago near the O'Hare Airport. Over the last 5 years, the City of Chicago has bought up more than 500 homes and businesses in Bensenville to prepare the way for a planned airport expansion project.  A year ago, Bensenville filed a lawsuit to stop the city from demolishing the sleepy suburban neighborhood it had bought up.  While a judge decided what to do on the matter, the houses and businesses have sat abandoned. Deer run through the streets.  The swimming pools are still full.  A few families, hesitant to talk to reporters, remain.

Let's take a tour at a handful of homes stationed in this doomed pocket of Illinois' vanishing village. After all, they won't be there much longer.

All photos by Jing Zhou.Photos were taken during a roadtrip in Mid-July, prompted by an article in the Reader.

#1 You've got mail

Photo by Jing Zhou. 

A roadtrip to Bensenville is a ticket to creepytown. And pictures like this give you a sense of why that is. It's the small things like this open mailbox that make you shiver. Did the owners just up and vanish while checking their mail one morning? (See it on our Google map).

Looking to get caught up on what's happening in Bensenville?

Look no further than this article by Ben Joravsky in the Chicago Reader published last month.  Joravsky breaks down each step leading up to today's court decision. As one might expect from the Reader, his sympathies don't exactly lie with the city...

Highlights from "The Dead Zone":

If you want to see the political might of Mayor
Daley in all its splendor, head west out of the city along Irving Park
Road to visit the part of Bensenville they call the “acquisition area.”

When
you get to Orchard Avenue, turn right and drive around the
neighborhood, taking the horseshoe formed by East Hillside Drive,
proceeding down Garden Avenue to West Roosevelt, then taking a left to
tour Greenlawn Avenue and Dierks and Hamilton streets. I recommend a
nighttime visit for the full apocalyptic effect. It’s like a scene from
a science-fiction flick about a civilization destroyed by the neutron
bomb. About 600 buildings remain—row after row of boarded-up town
houses, ranch houses, even a few mansions—but the people are gone. It’s
deathly still, except for the distant whoosh of traffic on Irving.

...Millennium Park, Meigs Field, Soldier Field, the Children’s
Museum—these are child’s play compared to what Daley did to
Bensenville. In pursuit of this project he persuaded state legislators
to let him reach across city lines and snatch up land in a neighboring
town. “No other municipality has ever had that kind of power,” says one
eminent domain expert who asked not to be named.

 Joravsky's piece is informative and detailed. Read the full thing here.

These signs adorn every house bought up by the city. Photo by Jing Zhou.

While you were reading about Brett Favre here on elsewhere, big news on the Bensenville front today.  A DuPage County judge gave the City of Chicago permission to begin tearing down the more than 500 properties it bought in recent years to make way for expansion of O'Hare International Airport.

About a year ago, a circuit judge granted the village of Bensenville a temporary restraining order to halt the demolition.

Meanwhile, in a show of desperation, Bensenville officials held an eleventh-hour press conference in front of a row of boarded up houses calling the project "a runway to nowhere" and claiming the demolition would release toxic chemicals into the environment.

The Tribune and CBS2 both have more details.  After a year of holding out hope, it looks like the 30 or so families still living in Bensenville are going to have to hit the road pretty soon.

The Tribune says no start date has been set and that the city still says it'll have construction completed by 2014.

Bensenville, Ill.  Photo by Jing Zhou.

Welcome to The Vanishing Village, a new blog on the Windy Citizen blog network that will track the impending demolition of part of the village of Bensenville, Ill. through the O'Hare Modernization Program.

There has been a lot of great journalism about what's happening out in Bensenville and there will be much more, but when we looked around, we couldn't see any single place that was pulling it all together and giving people a place to talk about it. Hence this blog.

We've been to Bensenville and have a handful of photo features to jumpstart this blog and give you a sense of what the scene up there looks like.  We'll also be linking out to news and other updates as they turn up.

Here's the thing though.  In order for this blog to work, we're going to need some help.  That's where you come in, dear reader. Comment on these posts. Let us know what you think about what's happening in Bensenville.

If you've got tips related to the Bensenville demolition, photos you took up there that you think would be of interest, please send them our way.  Also, if you'd be interested in editing this blog, please contact us as it will need some love and attention.  contact us at windycitizen@gmail.com

We'll get started with our photo posts in just a few minutes...