At the weekly meeting of the Democratic Party of Oak Park on May 11, Sen. Don Harmon introduced David Pope, immediate past and two-term Oak Park village president, as “the first president to look outside village borders” for problems to be solved.

As if to verify this allegation of extra-village focus, Pope attacked expressway construction as facilitating urban sprawl and permitting people to “flee the problems of the city.” Indeed, he said, in recent discussions about extending the Eisenhower Expressway, he has found Illinois Department of Transportation officials intent entirely on highway construction, as if “to make it easy for wealthy people in DuPage [County] to get back and forth to the city.”

Trouble is, he said, “38% of the people living in Austin have no car” and thus cannot profit from such construction.

From such concerns and the expressways they led to came the rise of Oak Brook…