Biohazard Cleanup Near Forest River Mount Prospect, IL

Mount Prospect is a village in Cook County, a northwest suburb of Chicago about 20 miles from the Loop, first settled by Yankee and German farmers after the 1833 Potawatomi treaty.

German immigrants founded St. John Lutheran Church in Mount Prospect in 1848, the first church in the area.

In the 1870s, real-estate developer Ezra Carpenter Eggleston subdivided farmland south of the railroad and named the community Mount Prospect because it sat on the highest ground in Cook County.

Mount Prospect famously could not incorporate until it reached the required 300 residents — in 1917 a newborn baby became the 300th resident, and voters then approved incorporation by a vote of 63 to 12.

William Busse, a local storeowner elected Mount Prospect's first village president in 1917, led the village until 1929.

Mount Prospect exploded after World War II, growing 370 percent during the 1950s alone to reach 18,906 residents by 1960.

Mount Prospect had a population of 56,852 at the 2020 census, with about 21,600 households in recent Census Bureau estimates.

Mount Prospect's Randhurst Shopping Center, which opened on August 16, 1962, was the Chicago area's first enclosed regional mall and the largest enclosed air-conditioned space in the United States at the time.

Randhurst was designed by mall pioneer Victor Gruen in a triangular 'pinwheel on the prairie' layout with a department store at each corner, and its name blends Rand Road and Elmhurst Road, the two roads at its site.

Built at the height of the Cold War, Randhurst Mall even included a fallout shelter big enough to hold every citizen of Mount Prospect; the mall was demolished and replaced by the open-air Randhurst Village in 2011.