Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Forest Park, IL

Forest Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, a near-west suburb of Chicago, with a population of 14,339 at the 2020 census packed into just 2.4 square miles.

The community was first incorporated as the town of Harlem in 1884 and took the name Forest Park when it incorporated under that name on April 17, 1907.

Forest Park is known as the 'Village of Cemeteries': cemetery burials in the village are estimated at more than 800,000, giving it roughly 30 dead 'residents' for every living one, a distinction once noted by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Forest Park's cemetery industry took off after lawsuits in 1868 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 led Chicago to ban new cemeteries within its city limits.

Its burial grounds include Forest Home, Concordia, Altenheim, Woodlawn and the Waldheim cemeteries; Jewish Waldheim, founded in 1870, was the village's first cemetery, and German Waldheim merged with Forest Home in 1968.

Forest Home Cemetery holds the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, a National Historic Landmark honoring the labor activists hanged after the 1886 Haymarket affair, as well as victims of the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire and the 1915 Eastland disaster.

Woodlawn Cemetery, opened in 1912 on about 95 acres, contains Showmen's Rest, a section of about 750 plots reserved for circus and carnival performers.

Film producer Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor's husband, is buried in the Beth Aaron section of Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park.

The Forest Park station is the western terminus of the CTA Blue Line, sitting in the median of the Eisenhower Expressway at Des Plaines Avenue.

The Des Plaines River runs through the village, and the 2000 census counted 7,632 households in Forest Park at a time when its population peaked at 15,688.