The Tinley Park Public Library, located at 7851 Timber Drive, in south suburbanTinley Park, Illinois 60477. It serves 56,703 people in Tinley Park (zip code 60477) and 7,149 people in Orland Hills (part of zip code 60487).
The TPPL is housed in a 58,700-square- foot red brick building located one-half block east of 80th Avenue, and just south of the 80th Avenue Metra train station. The library is one block north of the nearest major east-west thoroughfare, which is 183rd Street. It is a two-story building in which the ground floor is larger than the second floor by about 2,000 square feet.
The TPPL’s collection consists of 162,551 books, 7,206 video tapes and DVDs, 9,519 audio Recordings, forty-three databases, 391 print serials subscriptions, and 76,394 “Children's Holdings.” The foreign book collections are Arabic, German, Hindi, and Spanish (Adult fiction & non-fiction only).
Tinley Park is mostly located in Cook County, but also partly located in Will County. It is approximately twenty-three miles south of the Loop.
Orland Hills is to the northwest of Tinley Park, Mokena is to the southwest of Tinley Park, Frankfort Square is to the south, and Oak Forest is to the northeast. To the east of roughly two-thirds of Tinley Park is the Cook County Forest Preserve District’s South Green Belt Forest Preserve, and beyond that is County Club Hills and Flossmoor.
In his history of Tinley Park in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, Dave Bartlett observes, “There is much evidence of Native American residents in the area of Tinley Park, especially at the Oak Forest site to the east of town. The site, on the Tinley Moraine, overlooking a marshy area of glacial lake plain, dates to the 1600s. The 1816 Indian Boundary Line crosses to the southeast of the village.”
In 1835, the John Fulton family arrived from New York as the first permanent settlers. Early names for the community were the “English Settlement” and Yorktown. As large numbers of German immigrants arrived in the 1840s, it became known as New Bremen, after their port of departure – the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, a port-city on the Weser River, which lets out into the North Sea.
In 1850, Bremen Township was organized. The Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad arrived two years later and became an important part the area's early economic development. In 1892, the village was incorporated and named Tinley Park, in honor of Samuel Tinley, Sr., the longtime station master for the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad .
In 1869, a grain elevator opened in the village. This was followed, three years later, by a Dutch-style windmill.
Between the 1890s and 1940s, the village had a soft-drink bottling plant. Telephone service began in 1898 and a municipal water system was built the next year. In 1905, the Diamond Spiral Washing Machine Company built the first factory in Tinley Park
The population of the village stood at a mere 300 in 1900 and grew at a glacial pace – reaching 823 by 1930 – until after World War II, when young families moved there from Chicago because of affordable housing costs. Between1950 and 1980, the population doubled every decade. Tinley Park was one of Cook County’s fastest-growing communities.
About 80% of Tinley Park’s housing stock has been built since 1970. Larger, more expensive houses have been built in recent years and the Village of Tinley Park continues to annex land.
By 1960, the population had reached 6,392 people, 99.9% of whom were White. Thirty years later, the population had reached 37,121 people, of whom 35,689 (96.1%) were White, 565 (1.5%) were Black, seven were American Indians, 521 (1.4%) were Asian or Pacific Islander, 795 (2.1%) were of Hispanic Origin, and 368 (1%) residents listed their race as “Other.” Of the 48,401 residents found in the 2000 Census, 45,092 (93.2%) thought themselves exclusively White, 931 (1.9%) thought themselves exclusively African-American or Black, 63 thought themselves exclusively American Indian or Alaskan Native, 1,153 (2.4%) thought themselves exclusively Asian, nine thought themselves exclusively Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 539 (1.1%) thought themselves to belong to exclusively to Some other race,” 614 (2.3%) were biracial or multiracial, and 1,998 (4.1%) identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino.
A few famous people have resided in Tinley Park. Bartlett explains, “residents have included John Rauhoff, who created Ironite, an additive for waterproofing cement which was important in the building of Hoover Dam. John Poorman invented an improved chicken brooder.”
Three members of the Bettenhausen family became famous Indianapolis 500 drivers. Melvin E. "Tony" Bettenhausen, Sr. (1916-1961)was from Tinley Park. He raised his sons Gary Bettenhausen and Tony Bettenhausen, Jr. (1951-2000) in part in Tinley Park.
Bartlett notes, that to preserve Tinley Park’s history, “the area of the old 1892 village has been designated a historic district, where property owners are encouraged to restore and preserve their historic buildings and homes. The Carl Vogt Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been restored and is now used for commercial purposes. The Tinley Park Historical Society has renovated the Old Zion Landmark Church for use as its museum and headquarters.”
Approximately 28,000 people can attend concerts at the World Music Theater, an outdoor music venue that opened in 1990. In the intervening years, the name has changed several times. It was the New World Music Theater and the Tweeter Center. Now, it is known as the First Midwest Bank Amiptheater. Live Nation Entertainment (the company formed by the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster) owns the venue and First Midwest Bancorp, Inc. purchased the naming rights for a seven-year-long period in 2007.
Tinley Park has also experienced major commercial growth as industrial and office parks were built along the I-80 corridor. The Village of Tinley Park is committed to “controlled growth.” The Population reached 48,401 by 2000.
Orland Hills is part of Orland Township like the larger and better known Orland Park, which is both to the north and the west of Orland Hills. This prairieland started to be farmed in the 1850s.
The first subdivision went up in the 1950s at intersection of 167th Street and 94th Avenue. It consisted of over 100 homes.
Back then, there were open farmlands between that subdivision and the villages of Orland Park and Tinley Park. In 1961, residents voted to incorporate as the Village of Westhaven. Nine years later, Westhaven had its first request for new housing permits, which started a wave of construction projects and land annexations. Larry A. McClellan related in his entry on Orland Hills in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, “In 1971, the Wittich Memorial Church began work on a subdivision called Christian Hills.”
In 1986, the Village of Westhaven changed its name to the Village of Orland Hills. By 2000, it had a population of 6,779 people, of whom 5,878 (86.7%) thought themselves exclusively White, 346 (5.1%) thought themselves exclusively Black or African American, seventeen thought themselves to be exclusively American Indian or Alaskan Native, 225 (3.3%) thought themselves to be exclusively Asian, 117 (1.7%) thought themselves to be exclusively “Some other race,” 196 (2.9%) were biracial or multiracial, and 409 (6%) identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino.
On July 28, 1956, the first iteration of the Tinley Park Public Library was dedicated. It stood at 6871 West 171st Street. This was a temporary building provided by builder George Hartman. The site was donated by the Tinley Development Company. About eleven months later, on June 13, 1957, the Friends of the Library group formed.
On April 29, 1959, the dedication ceremony for the new library building constructed at 6871 West 171st Street was held. The library, staffed entirely by volunteers and maintained by donations, had seating room for eighteen people.
In January of 1966, the TPPL joined the Suburban Library System, which later became part of the Metropolitan Library System (MLS). Today, it is part of the Reaching Across Illinois System (RAILS), which serves libraries of all types in Northern Illinois (other than the Chicago Public Library System), and part of Central Illinois.
On October 16, 1971, the groundbreaking ceremony was held for a new library building, which would move the library organization closer to the center of population. Two and a half years later, on May 19, 1974, the new 25,000-square-foot library building erected at 17101 West 171st Street was dedicated. [Initially, only the upper floor was used.] Eight years and one month later, on June 20, 1982, the new Children's Department was dedicated on the lower level of the building.
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