Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Bellwood, IL

Bellwood is a village in Proviso Township, Cook County, located 13 miles west of Chicago's downtown Loop and packed into just 2.40 square miles.

Bellwood exists because of a temperance fight: local tavern owners pushed to incorporate the village on May 21, 1900, specifically to stop the neighboring 'dry' town of Maywood from annexing their subdivision.

The village took its name from the Bellewood subdivision — and lost the second 'e' by accident when an attorney preparing the incorporation papers misspelled it as Bellwood.

Bellwood grew from 943 residents in 1910, when many newcomers were German and Russian immigrants, to a peak of 22,096 in 1970 after Italian, Serbian and Polish families arrived with the new Eisenhower Expressway in the 1950s.

The 2020 census counted 18,789 people in Bellwood, and Census Bureau figures show about 5,948 households averaging just over three people each — among the larger household sizes in the Chicago suburbs.

Bellwood is bounded by the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) on the south and the sprawling Proviso Yards of the Union Pacific Railroad on the north.

NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to walk on the Moon, grew up in Bellwood.

Bellwood made national legal history in the 1970s when the village sued a local real estate firm for racially steering African American homebuyers away, a fair-housing fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Andre F. Harvey became Bellwood's first African American mayor in 2017.

Bellwood's own School District 89 runs seven schools, including Roosevelt Middle School and Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, while most Bellwood teenagers attend Proviso West High School in neighboring Hillside.