From A Two-Lane Blacktop In 1959 To A Route 66 Icon On The National Register
Before Willowbrook was Willowbrook, the area was open prairie and farmland in unincorporated DuPage County, between the established town of Hinsdale (incorporated 1873 along the CB&Q line) and what would later become Darien (which didn't incorporate as a village until 1969). The closest meaningful road was U.S. Route 66 — the Mother Road from Chicago to Santa Monica — which had been routed through what's now the village's southern edge in the 1920s. Route 83 was a two-lane blacktop. Cows mooed in the morning across the fields where Lake Hinsdale Village now stands. Three houses sat on a 40-acre unincorporated field along Quincy Drive when Frank and Marilyn Zimmerman moved there in 1959.
What changed everything was a deadline. The Ridgemoor Homeowners Association — a group of residents in 37 houses centered around the Ridgemoor subdivision — wanted to incorporate as a village to guide the development of the surrounding farmland. But a new Illinois law scheduled to take effect January 1, 1960 would require a population of 400 residents for incorporation. Willowbrook had only 167. The group's attorney expedited the court case to get incorporation approved before the new law's threshold kicked in. While the case was being heard, the attorney called the homeowners association president, Anton "Tony" Borse, frantically asking for a name. Borse looked out his window at the willow trees along the creek behind his property and named the village in one minute. The Village of Willowbrook officially incorporated on January 18, 1960 — beating the new state law by 18 days.
Borse became the first village president; the village board met in his living room at 508 Ridgemoor from 1960 to 1965. The first separate Village Hall was an old brick bungalow near 72nd and Madison Street in unincorporated Hinsdale — village offices on the first floor, the file room in the bathtub, the police department in the basement (with one of the support posts used to handcuff prisoners). On May 29, 1961, Governor Otto Kerner commissioned Frank Zimmerman as Police Magistrate authorized to perform marriages — Zimmerman married 16 or 17 couples in his living room over the next several years. Population grew explosively after the founding: 167 in 1960 → 1,457 in 1970 → 4,953 in 1980 → 8,598 in 1990 → 9,236 in 2020. New apartments, condos, and subdivisions filled in the farmland; the village's character shifted from rural-edge to mature-suburban over four decades.
What the village inherited from the Route 66 era is its single nationally recognized landmark: Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket at 645 Joliet Road. The story begins in the late 1920s, when Ervin "Irv" Kolarik opened a gas station with a small lunch counter in what was then unincorporated farmland south of Hinsdale. In 1936, the Chicken Basket became an official bus stop on Joliet Road for the Bluebird Coach Lines, which ran on Route 66. In 1938, two local farm women came in for coffee, overheard Kolarik complaining that he hated running the gas station and preferred the lunch counter, and offered to share their secret fried chicken recipe in exchange for him buying his chickens from them. The fried chicken was an instant success. The lunch counter overflowed; Kolarik converted the gas station's car-repair bays into dining rooms; eventually he bought the adjacent property and hired Chicago architect Eugene F. Stoyke to build a one-story brick restaurant and cocktail lounge. The current Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket building opened in 1946.
The Chicken Basket's location was no accident. Hinsdale Airport sat directly across the street, and diners could watch planes take off and land from the front windows. (The airport closed in the 1950s.) Kolarik was a marketing genius — during winters, he flooded the roof of the restaurant and hired local youths to ice skate on top, drawing Route 66 travelers' attention. The Glass Rooster Cocktail Lounge wing was added in 1956. Then everything changed: the new Interstate Highway System routed I-55 through the area in the late 1950s, bypassing Route 66 and cutting off the Chicken Basket's traffic almost completely. Kolarik briefly sold the business in 1959, then bought it back, but the customers had stopped coming. In 1963, Delbert "Dell" Rhea — a prominent Chicago businessman who had managed the Stevens Hotel and served as executive director of the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, and who at the time owned the Woodbine Inn down the street — bought the Chicken Basket at a bargain price. He sold the Woodbine Inn, kept the Chicken Basket's menu and name, and added his own. With aggressive advertising aimed at Chicago's expanding suburban population, the restaurant flourished again under Rhea, his wife Grace, and (after Dell's death in 1992) his son Patrick.
Recognition followed. June 1992: Inducted into the Route 66 Hall of Fame. May 5, 2006: Added to the National Register of Historic Places, alongside Lou Mitchell's at the Chicago start of Route 66 and the Ariston Cafe in Litchfield. Featured twice on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives (Season 5, Episode 9 in the Route 66 episode, then again in Season 28). On Bill Curtis's 1994 Route 66 documentary. On the cover of Route 66 Magazine. In a Japanese travel guide. On Discovery Channel Europe. The current slogan: "Get Your Chicks on Route 66." In 2019, the Lombardi family (Annie Lombardi) bought the restaurant with the promise to keep the original recipe and homestyle environment intact. The restaurant continues to operate at 645 Joliet Road, and serves about 2,000 pounds of chicken weekly.
Today Willowbrook is 9,236 residents on 2.63 square miles, bordered by five villages — Hinsdale, Westmont, Clarendon Hills, Burr Ridge, and Darien. The village has no Metra station; residents drive 5-10 minutes to BNSF stations at Hinsdale, Clarendon Hills, or Westmont, or to the Burr Ridge Park-n-Ride for Pace I-55 express buses. The village is unusually diverse for DuPage County: roughly 15-19% Asian, 27-31% foreign-born, with nearly 40% of residents speaking a language other than English at home. Median household income is approximately $97,900 — solidly upper-middle-income. 25.8% of residents are 65 or older — the highest senior share of any rebuilt suburb on this site. High school students attend Hinsdale Township High School District 86 — the same district that serves Hinsdale itself. Elementary feeders include Maercker District 60, Gower District 62, Hinsdale 181, and Center Cass District 66 depending on address.
The village's recreational anchors include Willow Pond (a former Route 83 swamp cleaned up in 1990, now circled by a walking trail and popular for ice skating in winter), the nearby Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve (where the willow-lined creek that named the village flows), and ten community parks. Hotels include The Champagne Lodge, a boutique couples' hotel along Route 83. The village's location at the I-55/Route 83 interchange between five suburbs, two airports, and Oakbrook Center makes Willowbrook a natural lodging anchor for visitors to the western suburbs.
Lincoln Limo Inc serves Willowbrook because Willowbrook is the kind of village a 1960 highway-era suburb becomes when its residents stay put for sixty years. A community without a Metra station, with a high senior population, with hotel and retail anchors near the I-55 interchange, with the Route 66 history on full display at Dell Rhea's, and with a diverse demographic profile that doesn't fit any easy DuPage stereotype. Reservation-based black car for the airport runs, the Loop returns, the medical-appointment standing reservations, the hotel-to-airport transfers, and the late-evening downtown returns when the BNSF in Hinsdale or Clarendon Hills no longer fits the schedule. Same driver, same Escalade ESV, every booking, year after year.