Why is there a cemetery at O’Hare Airport?

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The suburban village of Bensenville has a long history of getting eaten up by development. Resthaven Cemetery is a symbol of what remains.

Transcript

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0:31.4	It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate.
0:37.4	Report. Explore. And investigate. Report.
0:38.3	Explore.
0:39.3	From WBEZ.
0:41.3	What's up, Chicago?
0:42.3	I'm Erin Allen.
0:44.3	If you travel out of O'Hare Airport, you're probably familiar with the busy departure and arrival lanes, the congestion at CSA, and all the sprawling terminals.
0:59.5	But there's a whole other side to O'Hare we don't really see, the industrial side.
1:07.3	And then tucked even further in that section with the warehouses and cargo planes is something truly out of place.
1:12.5	Andrew Meriwether has this week's story.
1:18.2	Curious City listener, AJ Kefka, noticed something unexpected one day while he was commuting home from work on I-294, near O'Hare Airport.
1:22.0	Just off of Irving Park Road, he noticed one of those brown signs, you know, one of the ones
1:26.7	with white text that mark a historical site.
1:29.3	It read Rest Haven Cemetery.
1:31.3	It's kind of hard to get onto the airport property, so it was amazing to me that there was a sign that said that there was a cemetery there.
1:38.3	It's a cemetery flanked by the industrial side of O'Hare.
	...

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