The Four Forces
That Built Orland Park

In 1947, Victor J. Andrew was running a communications equipment company he had founded in the basement of his Chicago South Side bungalow ten years earlier. His company needed clear land for outdoor antenna testing. He needed proximity to rail lines. He needed room to grow. He found it in Orland Park, Illinois — 430 acres of unincorporated farmland that nobody else wanted, available for $200 per acre.

Total purchase price: $86,000 for 430 acres. In 2005, the company would sell just 104 of those acres for $28.5 million. In 2007, CommScope would acquire the entire Andrew Corporation for approximately $2.65 billion. That is the full arc of what $86,000 of Orland Park farmland became.

Andrew built its first manufacturing building on the site in 1954 — 15,000 square feet. By 1960, the company moved its entire Chicago headquarters to Orland Park. By 1999, it was an S&P 500 company with $791.8 million in annual sales and 4,572 employees. The company had factories in 35 countries. Its HELIAX® coaxial cable was the gold standard for cellular tower infrastructure worldwide. During the 1990s telecom boom, Andrew was the company building the backbone of every cellular network on earth.

For most Americans, the dot-com crash of 2000–2001 was something that happened to tech companies in Silicon Valley. For Orland Park, it happened at 10500 West 153rd Street. Andrew Corporation traded on NASDAQ under the symbol ANDW. It was not a dot-com startup — it was a 60-year-old manufacturer with real products and real revenue. But it was deeply embedded in the telecom infrastructure boom.

Stock option exercise prices referenced in Andrew's SEC filings from the late 1990s ranged from $37.25 to $38.17 per share — meaning options were being granted when the stock was trading around $38, and employees needed the stock to stay above that price to profit. During the boom years, ANDW climbed well above those levels, creating significant paper wealth for thousands of Orland Park residents.

Then the telecom carriers — who had massively overbuilt their networks during the 1990s bubble — stopped ordering. Andrew's orders "declined 5% from last year" even as early as July 1997. By 2001, eight factories were closing. By 2003, the company was reporting quarterly losses. The paper fortunes of Orland Park's professional class vanished in precisely the same years that their mortgage payments on their Catalina and Clearview homes were due.

Orland Park's geographic position — at the intersection of I-80, Harlem Avenue, LaGrange Road, and 159th Street — made it an ideal location for car dealerships. A customer from any direction in the southwest suburbs could reach Orland Park's 159th Street corridor without touching an expressway. By the 2010s, the stretch of 159th Street from roughly Wolf Road to Harlem Avenue had become one of the most concentrated auto dealer corridors in Illinois.

For the village government, car dealerships are a golden goose. Every vehicle sale generates Illinois sales tax, a portion of which flows to the municipality where the dealership is located. A single high-volume dealership can generate millions of dollars in annual tax revenue for a village. Orland Park has cultivated and subsidized its auto row aggressively — and under Keith Pekau, the pattern of campaign donation → village approval was as systematic with car dealers as it was with real estate developers.

Harlem Avenue is one of those streets that Chicagoans take completely for granted but that is, in objective terms, one of the most significant roads in America. At 54.1 miles running from Glenview Road in Glenview to the intersection with Illinois Route 50 in Peotone, it is the third-longest street in the United States — after Telegraph Road in Michigan and O Street in Nebraska. It carries Illinois Route 43 for most of its length.

For Orland Park, Harlem Avenue defines the eastern boundary. The Catalina subdivision — those streets named Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford — is located west of Harlem Avenue, north of 159th Street. The Clearview subdivision is north of 143rd Street, west of 82nd Avenue. Every new subdivision description in Orland Park is measured from Harlem, LaGrange Road, or Wolf Road. These three north-south arterials organized the entire suburban buildout.

Before the 1970s development boom, the stretch of Harlem Avenue through what is now Orland Park was either farmland or didn't exist as a continuous improved road. Victor J. Andrew chose his campus location partly because of the Metra rail lines — not Harlem Avenue, which wasn't yet what it became. The road followed the development. And the development followed the permits. And the permits followed the machine.

Interstate 80 is one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th century — a transcontinental highway stretching 2,900 miles from San Francisco to Fort Lee, New Jersey. It passes through the south suburban Chicago area along a corridor that, in 1964 when it opened, was mostly farmland. That farmland was Orland Park. The highway changed the equation for everything that followed.

Victor J. Andrew had chosen Orland Park in 1947 partly for its railroad access — the Rock Island and Wabash Metra lines provided the industrial backbone. But the highway system provided the residential and commercial backbone. A family in a Catalina subdivision home could drive to work at the Andrew campus in five minutes, drive to Orland Square Mall in ten, and reach Chicago via I-80 eastbound to I-57 or I-94 in under an hour. The entire suburban lifestyle equation — live here, work here, shop here, commute there — was made possible by the convergence of Harlem Avenue, 159th Street, and I-80.

For the car dealerships, I-80 was existential. A customer from Frankfort could get to Joe Rizza Ford on 159th Street without navigating Chicago surface streets. A customer from Joliet could reach the Zeigler BMW dealership in twenty minutes. The catchment area for Orland Park auto dealers extended across Will and Cook counties precisely because I-80 made the distance trivial. The sales tax revenue those dealers generated — which Pekau's administration converted into campaign cash via inducement agreements — flowed from highway access.