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Metropolitan Library System

1966 establishments in IllinoisBurr Ridge, IllinoisPublic libraries in Illinois

The Metropolitan Library System (MLS) was an association of academic, public, school, and special libraries in Chicago and its suburbs in Cook, DuPage and Will counties. On July 1, 2011, Metropolitan Library System merged with Alliance Library System, DuPage Library System, North Suburban Library System, and Prairie Area Library System to form the Reaching Across Illinois Library System. Sarah Ann Long, director of the North Suburban Library System, summarized the evolution of organizations in northern Illinois in a 2011 essay,"Context is Everything."

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Metropolitan Library System (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Metropolitan Library System
Avenue la Tours,

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N 41.833333333333 ° E -88 °
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Avenue la Tours

Avenue la Tours
60515
Illinois, United States
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Yorktown Center
Yorktown Center

Yorktown Center is a shopping mall located in the village of Lombard, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The mall's anchor stores are JCPenney, Marshalls, and Von Maur, with one vacant anchor store that was once Carson Pirie Scott. The Von Maur store is the second largest in the chain, the largest being at Perimeter Mall that opened in 2012 in Dunwoody, Georgia. The mall also features more than 100 other stores on its two levels. Other amenities include a food court and an outdoor concourse of shops known as The Shops on Butterfield. At the time of its 1968 opening, the 1,300,000-square-foot (120,000 m2) Yorktown Center ranked as the largest shopping center in America. The mall was originally a four-anchor indoor mall - three-story Carson Pirie Scott and Wieboldt's anchor department stores faced each other across a central courtyard, while wings for two-story JCPenney and Montgomery Ward anchor department stores stretched northward and southward, respectively, from the center courtyard. North of the mall proper, a strip mall dubbed the "Convenience Center" was constructed. This was originally anchored by a Grand Union supermarket. Other perimeter buildings included auto centers for the JCPenney and Montgomery Ward anchors, a General Cinema movie theater, and two restaurants. One unusual feature is the Boeger-Brinkman Cemetery on the southern end of the parking lot, along Butterfield Road. The cemetery was part of a family's farmland that was sold to develop Yorktown Center. A small section of the cemetery remains while others were moved for the construction of the shopping center. Since 2020, another new feature of the mall is that it is now considered the first dog-friendly mall in the entire state of Illinois.

York Center, Illinois

York Center is an unincorporated community in York Township, DuPage County, Illinois, United States. York Center is located by Meyers Road and 16th Street, near the southern border of Lombard, and the western border of Oakbrook Terrace. York Center has an elementary school, established in 1958, and a fire protection district, which covers unincorporated areas of Lombard, Villa Park, Oak Brook, and Oakbrook Terrace. The York Center Cooperative (Co-op) community was founded immediately after World War II as a co-op on the principles of shared ownership "to promote and develop good will, high moral values, wholesome cooperative activities and healthy civic spirit." Louis Shirky, who also established a Church of the Brethren in York Center, purchased the Goltermann farm for the housing cooperative. At its founding, the co-op was an experiment in what was then considered radical living. Chicagoans who wanted to escape the prejudice and confinement of the city to build affordable homes in the suburbs flocked to what was then a bucolic farm, which the people of the co-op purchased and subdivided. Members learned to tout the 100 acres of communally-owned property as an economically mixed community that was tolerant of all races, religions and ethnicities. Many, but not all, of early residents, including Louis Shirky, were members of the York Center Church of the Brethren. The purpose was to establish a new kind of community, a housing cooperative based on open membership "to all persons of good will."Archivist Dennis Bilger of the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., has stated, "It is probably true that the York Center Cooperative was, if not the first, one of the very earliest integrated housing developments in the United States." In 1949, President Harry Truman issued an executive order declaring racial discrimination illegal in the granting of Federal Housing Administration loans. The watershed edict came after York Center Co-op members teamed up with the NAACP in a test case.Girl Scouting was an important aspect of life in York Center. The Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana now serves the area which was led by R. Hopley "Hop" Roberts in the days when it was part of the DuPage County Council.The York Center Cooperative was legally dissolved in 2010.In 2021, the Lombard Historical Society produced the documentary, Common Good ~ The York Center Co-op Story, which is characterized as "An epic tale of a pioneering, faith-based effort that provided fair housing, community and opportunity in an era of white flight, redlining and restrictive covenants that effectively prevented non-white Americans from fully participating in the American dream."