Arlington Heights, IL

Two railroad stops organize very different parts of Arlington Heights. The downtown Metra station sits amid apartments, restaurants, shops, the library, village offices, and the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre. The Arlington Park stop lies beside the 326-acre former racecourse, whose grandstand and other buildings were demolished in 2023 after the Chicago Bears bought the property. Arlington's final horse race ran on September 25, 2021, ending the public use that had long defined this part of the village. The land remains a major open question. The team said on June 5, 2026, that it had voted to advance a stadium project in Hammond, Indiana, leaving the Arlington Heights site without the football complex once proposed there. The same rail line serves a mature downtown at one stop and a cleared redevelopment site at the other.

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Downtown concentrates much of the village's civic and cultural life. Metropolis has a 329-seat theater and presents stage productions, concerts, comedy, and cabaret alongside a performing-arts school. A few blocks north, Arlington Heights Memorial Library occupies its Dunton Avenue building. Its Makerplace opened in 2021 inside the former 1952 memorial-library building on Belmont Avenue, returning that earlier public building to library use for hands-on creative work. Restaurants and storefronts connect these institutions to the station. Beyond downtown, office, retail, and manufacturing properties line several major corridors, and Northwest Community Hospital's Central Road campus adds a large health-care workplace. A proposed cancer and neurosciences building on that campus entered state review in May 2026; it remained a proposal at that point.

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The same railroad also created the original settlement. In 1853, William Dunton sold land to the Illinois & Wisconsin Railroad and established Bradley, soon renamed Dunton. The community took the Arlington Heights name in 1874 and incorporated as a village in 1887. Its largest expansion followed World War II: population rose from 8,727 in 1950 to 64,884 in 1970 as subdivisions replaced fields around the older rail center. The Historical Museum preserves several pieces of the pre-suburban town, including the 1882 F. W. Müller House, the 1908 N. M. Banta House, and a 1906 soda-pop factory. These buildings cluster on a compact museum campus near Recreation Park. Five neighborhood community centers distribute recreation across Arlington Heights.

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The facilities at Camelot, Frontier, Heritage, Pioneer, and Recreation parks pair indoor classes with outdoor pools and nearby fields. Arlington Ridge Center, reopened after a major renovation in 2020, adds four indoor pools, gyms, an indoor track, and fitness space near the center of the village. Lake Arlington fills another role on the north side: its 50-acre detention lake was built for flood control and is circled by a path, with fishing and small-boat access but no swimming. Its roughly two-mile loop turns a piece of stormwater infrastructure into a north-side outdoor circuit. In early July, Recreation Park becomes the grounds for Frontier Days, placing a long-running festival around a community center built as a Works Progress Administration project in 1937.