Willow Springs station (Illinois)

Willow Springs is a village in Cook County, Illinois, with a small portion in DuPage County. The village was founded in 1892, and was named for the springs along the Des Plaines River. Per the 2020 census, the population was 5,857.

The Willowbrook Ballroom was a dance ballroom and banquet facility located in Willow Springs, Illinois along Archer Avenue. It was founded in 1921 by John Verderbar and named Oh Henry Park. The Willowbrook Ballroom is often cited as the last place Resurrection Mary danced before her death. Her ghost is said to appear at the ballroom at times, dancing with the patrons.On Friday October 28, 2016 the Ballroom was gutted by a fire. The building was having work done on the roof where the fire was suspected of starting. Due to water pressure issues the fire department had to wait on tanker trucks, which caused a delay in getting the fire under control.

Courtright's was a Michelin-starred restaurant in Willow Springs, in the U.S. state of Illinois.

The Chicago Area Consolidation Hub (CACH) is a package sorting facility for United Parcel Service, located in the village of Hodgkins, Illinois. CACH serves as a sorting facility for packages traveling in the United States and the world. Construction began in October 1991 at the site previously occupied by the GM Truck and Bus manufacturing plant, with the CACH facility opening on March 31, 1995. The facility has an area of 48.9 acres (198,000 m2), and has a perimeter of 3.1 miles (5.0 km). It employs over 9,000 people available to work one of the four sorts, Sunrise, Day, Twilight, Night. CACH is the largest ground hub in UPS's worldwide network. Packages are only handled during loading and unloading; all sorting takes place through a system of conveyor belts and push paddles, utilizing high-speed cameras to read the destination from a smart label to sort a package to its trailer. Unlike most UPS facilities, CACH does not have Package Centers which service package cars. The facility sorts approximately 1.6 million packages per day. During November and December, volume can exceed 3 million packages per day. UPS often uses CACH for new technology testing and validation prior to deployment in other facilities. Rubus unload devices have been used in limited quantities in CACH since 2013.

The Mile-Long Bridge is the colloquial name for a 4,608-foot-long (1,404.5 m) bridge in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Illinois. The bridge carries Interstate 294 (I-294) over the Des Plaines River, the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, two major railroad lines, and an intermodal facility. A series of 51 piers carries I-294 over the broad Des Plaines River valley.In spite of its name, the bridge falls 672 feet (205 m) short of one full mile in length.

The Palos Forest Preserves are 15,000 acres of forest preserves in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, located principally in Palos Township, Illinois.During the 1930s, the area of the Palos Preserves south of Archer was known as the Argonne Forest. This commemorated the battleground of the Meuse–Argonne offensive where over one million Americans fought during World War I. During World War II, Argonne Forest land leased to the Army Corps of Engineers became Site A, a research facility where experimental nuclear reactors built for the Manhattan Project helped in the development of the first nuclear weapons. The Argonne Forest area is known to geologists as Mount Forest Island, an area which, during the Last Glacial Period, formed a triangular island 6 miles (9.7 km) long and 4 miles (6.4 km) wide, rising 80 to 120 feet (24 to 37 m) above the waters of the surrounding ice-age Lake Chicago.The Palos Preserves feature the Palos Trail System, the forest district's largest multi-trail system. The system comprises some 40 miles of unpaved trails, connected to each other by many intersections. The longest trail, "Yellow Unpaved" is 9.2 miles long, while "Brown Unpaved" is the shortest, at 1.1 miles. Trails are made for hiking, bicycle riding, horseback riding, and, in the winter, even skiing. There are sixteen entrances to the system which, along with the preserves as a whole, are open from dawn to dusk each day.The 6,600-acre Mount Forest Island area was, in 2021, designated an Urban Night Sky Place by the International Dark-Sky Association. It is the largest such Urban Night Sky Place designation in the world.Communities adjoining the preserves are Palos Hills, Palos Park, and Hickory Hills.

The Robert Vial House is a historic house located at 7425 S. Wolf Rd. in Burr Ridge, Illinois. Built in 1856, the house is the oldest in Burr Ridge and the only example of an early farmhouse in the community. The house was designed in the upright-and-wing form of the Greek Revival style and also features elements of the Italianate and Classical Revival styles. The two-story house has a front gable and a 1+1⁄2-story side wing. The house's main entrance is bordered by sidelights and a transom and framed by pilasters supporting a plain pediment. The front of the house has five six-over-six wood sash windows with wooden shutters. The wing has a front porch with a sloping overhang supported by columns. The house's main eave features ornamental Italianate brackets.Robert Vial was the second son of Joseph Vial, an early settler of Lyons Township who was also the area's first postmaster and a founder of Lyonsville Congregational Church. Robert built the house for himself in 1856. He operated one of the largest farms in the area, and his farms had the first silo constructed in Cook County. Vial also served as a school director, township supervisor and treasurer of schools and as deacon of the Lyonsville Congregational Church, as had his father before him. After Robert Vial's death, his children converted his farm to a golf course, and the farmhouse became the course's clubhouse (both are gone now, having been converted into a housing development in what is now Western Springs, Illinois). In 1989, the Flagg Creek Heritage Society moved the house from its original location on Plainfield Road to its current site a few miles to the south on Wolf Road. The society restored the house and later turned it into a local history museum.The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 31, 2007.

The Lithuanian National Cemetery (Lithuanian: Lietuvių tautinės kapinės) is a non-profit cemetery in Justice, Illinois, that mainly serves the Lithuanian American community in Chicago. Established in 1911, it is the resting place of many prominent Lithuanians in politics, culture, and science.

Hodgkins is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States, and is an industrial suburb of Chicago. The population was 1,500 at the 2020 census, down from 1,897 at the 2010 census.A United Parcel Service facility, known as CACH, is located in Hodgkins at 1 UPS Way. CACH employs over 9,000 people and is the "largest package sorting center in the world".

Indian Head Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States, slightly north of the intersection of Interstate 294 and Interstate 55. The village is south of Western Springs, west of Countryside, north and east of Burr Ridge. Per the 2020 census, the population was 4,065. The village's ZIP code is 60525 (La Grange).

Saganashkee Slough is a 377 acres (153 ha), manmade riparian lake that forms part of the valley of the Cal-Sag Channel. It is located in the Palos Forest Preserves of Cook County, Illinois, on wetland that was drained but was later reverted to a lake starting in 1948-1949 by the construction of dams and levees. Saganashkee Slough, like other segments of the Cal-Sag canal and valley system, drains into the Des Plaines River and ultimately into the Illinois River.

Red Gate Woods is a forest preserve section within the Palos Forest Preserve, a division of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, Illinois. It is located near where the Cal-Sag Channel meets the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. In the woods is the original site of Argonne National Laboratory and the Site A/Plot M Disposal Site, which contains the buried remains of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear reactor. This section of the forest preserves, then code named "Argonne" (after Forest of Argonne) was leased by county commissioners to the Manhattan Project (and later Argonne Laboratory) in the 1940s and 1950s. After its initial tests, the reactor at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago was removed and reassembled at the Metallurgical Laboratory site in these woods ("Site A"). Local residents reported encountering US Army MPs guarding the area during World War II but no one was aware of the true nature of the activities until long after the war. After further experiments and the shutdown of Pile 1, by then designated Pile 2, a huge hole was dug and the 2-story high reactor was pushed into it and buried ("Plot M"). Other reactors were also built at the site and nuclear waste was buried there. The site is monitored by the United States Department of Energy and is open to the public.By the 1970s there was increased public concern about the levels of radioactivity at the site, which was used for recreation by local residents. Surveys conducted in the 1980s found strontium-90 in the soil at Plot M, trace amounts of tritium in nearby wells, and plutonium, technetium, caesium, and uranium in the area. In 1994, the United States Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory yielded to public pressure and earmarked $24.7 million and $3.4 million respectively to rehabilitate the site. As part of the cleanup, 500 cubic yards (380 m3) of radioactive waste was removed and sent to the Hanford Site for disposal. By 2002, the Illinois Department of Public Health had determined that the remaining materials posed no danger to public health.There is signage in the parking lot showing Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi at the Red Gate Woods site during the Manhattan Project. Concrete markers designate historic sites and the foundations of Manhattan Project labs still exist.