Original Grizzly

I lived in Forest Park, IL from around 1984 until 2007... from the age of about 5 until the age of 31.  In that stretch there were a couple of years here and there where I lived in Berwyn and Riverside, but even in those years my work, as well as my tiny circle of friends, were both still rooted in Forest Park.  It was the center of my world for more than half my life, to the point where I'm now writing about it from freaking Delaware.   So I find I'm a little embarrassed, and retroactively disappointed, to admit that it was only in the final year or two of my time in Forest Park that I learned about the large and extremely popular amusement park that once existed where the blue line CTA terminal on DesPlaines Ave is today.   Looking at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine captures of Wikipedia, information about the Forest Park Amusement Park wasn't added until some time between March and July of 2006, shortly before I moved away.  However I still ...

 Picking the name might be my least favorite part of starting a new blog.  Whatever it is I wanted so badly to say to the world gets shelved and everything just screeches to a halt. Hello, world!  I'm starting this blog to document (and share?) what I know and what I'm learning about my hometown of Forest Park, IL.  If you're unfamiliar (how did you get here?), it's a suburb of Chicago, just a mile-and-a-half straight west along 290.  It's also, somehow, a village.  The Village of Forest Park.  Calling it that always hit my ears a little odd, because my brain's default image of a "village" is the same as the first definition Google coughs up, from Oxford Languages:  vil-lage noun a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, situated in a rural area. Exactly that, especially the rural  part.  A village is a place you end up after walking a path through a forest for hours.  It has a handful...