R I P President Stephens

The Mayor of Rosemont passed away the other day. He reigned for 50 years in the position, and he became very wealthy running a village of about 2 square miles.

When he started, Rosemont flooded so often that many of the residents had their own rowboats. Des Plaines, Park Ridge, and Schiller Park all looked at the mess and wouldn’t annex the area, so Stephens got the area incorporated. He expanded village boundaries, began commercialization, and worked to correct flooding problems. And boy did he commercialize.

An estimated 3.4 million visitors came to Rosemont in 1996. Several new hotels were built in the late 1990s, and by 2000 the city offered 5,687 hotel rooms in 14 hotels. All this for a village with 4224 residents and a board consisting of President 6 trustees plus a full-time clerk.

But what I want to see is the inside of his garage. Some Rosemont people gripe that a lot of Rosemont Horizon money helped Stephens amass his collection of collector cars. And the collection isn’t even in Rosemont, it’s too big. It’s here in Delavan, just down South Shore Drive from me.

Oh yea, it looks better when the fountain is running in the pond you see in the foreground. The building is L-shaped, with the longer part of the L in the back, parallel to the road. In the next shot you get an idea of the size. That’s a full double door on the end, and it’s only big enough to get vehicles in and out down the center aisle.

And for the final touch, everyone talks about living in a gated community?

An acquaintance says he was in there once and got a quick look at all the vehicles. There’s even a German WWII General’s touring car. Talk about expensive hobbies?

I used to dream about owning one of the houses on South Shore Drive, I’d like one of the five Frank Lloyd Wright houses, mainly because I survived 4 years living in one of the Miese boxes at Illinois Institute of Technology, and can’t abide the present “Steel and glass up your $%^ style of architecture.

But now, I’ll settle for just owning a garage.

I do wonder what will happen to the collection when the estate is divided. Hey, maybe they’ll have a garage sale!