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For three years, this column has chronicled how no one maintains a residential street in unincorporated Bremen Township near Midlothian.
No one plowed the 14600 block of Linder Avenue on Monday after more than 4 inches of snow fell. No one fills in the craters and potholes throughout the year.
Bremen Township and Cook County officials have insisted the land on which the street was built is privately owned. They have said because there is no record the street was publicly dedicated, they cannot legally work on the road.
Yet, everyone treats it like a public street. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, garbage trucks, U.S. mail carriers, package delivery vehicles, school buses and just about every other type of vehicle drives up and down the narrow, bumpy block.
Residents who own six properties that front the 14600 block of Linder Avenue have disputed that they own the land on which the road was built. They have said their deeds and other records show their property lines end on the east side of the road.
Township and county officials have said they’re working on a legal resolution to the issue, and that they hope to have a public entity take ownership of the roadway later this year.
Scott Mondi, a Michigan resident who said he grew up in the neighborhood, recently discovered columns about the unusual situation. He contacted me and shared copies of old newspaper articles and other historical documentation about the area before it was developed as a residential subdivision in the late 1950s.
His family research revealed a rich history dating back more than a century. Mondi said he grew up in the 14600 block of Long Avenue, which is one street east of Linder Avenue and the first street west of Midlothian Country Club.
“The Midlothian Country Club was founded in 1898 on the rolling landscape of the Tinley Moraine,” according to the “Encyclopedia of Chicago,” an authoritative history of the region. “The country club, founded by George R. Thorne, president of Montgomery Ward and Company, attracted the elites of Chicago society and was the first golf club south of the city.”
Newspaper publisher Merrill C. Meigs, the namesake of Chicago’s Meigs Field, enjoyed golfing at the club in the 1920s, according to a Chicago Tribune story published in 1996, when the lakefront airport closed.
“Meigs was struck by a vision, nearly fully formed, on the golf course at Midlothian Country Club in May of 1927,” the Tribune reported. “‘We were playing nine holes,’ he recalled later, ‘when we got word out there on the course that Charles Augustus Lindbergh had made it to Paris, flying alone.
“‘I had never been in an airplane in my life, but when I got back to the office, … we immediately started the promotion of Chicago as the world center of aviation. And I bought an airplane,’” Meigs once recounted, the Tribune reported.
In the 1920s, the land west of Midlothian Country Club was the site of a famous farm. Charles D. Ettinger founded Maple Farm in 1909, and it was renowned for raising dairy cows that produced record quantities of milk and other prize-winning animals.
That’s according to, “The Story of the Beginning of Maple Farm of Midlothian,” a 1911 booklet available for viewing in the reference section of the Midlothian Public Library. Walter A. Cook, an assistant in dairy husbandry at Pennsylvania State College, wrote the account after visiting Maple Farm at the time of the National Dairy Show in Chicago.
“Already the farm is being celebrated for the excellence of its products and the superiority of the individuals in the different herds and flocks,” Cook wrote, less than two years after Ettinger started the farm.
“With such a growth in twenty-two months it is hard to predict what the future of the place will be, but it is safe to say that, if the present plans are followed, it will not be many years before breeders who wish to purchase the best strains of Guernsey cattle, Belgian draft horses, Chester White pigs and White Plymouth Rock poultry, will find the highest types of all these breeds on Maple Farm,” Cook wrote.
Cook wrote that Ettinger bought 106 acres and built a large country home and other structures on 6 acres. When he bought the land, it was formerly cornfields “without a tree or shrub of any kind on it.”
Ten years after Ettinger died in 1916, members of the Mondi family acquired the Maple Farm land and adjacent properties. They planned to turn the farm into a recreation complex and considered such concepts as a public golf course, swimming pool, a motor speedway and polo grounds, according to a 1934 Chicago Tribune account.
“Plans for the development of an elaborate recreation project were disclosed yesterday when title to 405 acres in Bremen Township, adjoining the Midlothian Country Club on the west, was conveyed by the Chicago Title and Trust company, as trustee, to Frank Mondi, and by him to the Maple Farm Country Club Inc.,” the Tribune reported.
As years passed, plans for the recreation complex fizzled. In 1954, Frank Mondi’s brother, James V. Mondi, asked the Cook County zoning board to rezone 116 acres from farming to residential so he could build 300 homes, according to a Chicago Tribune account.
“Mondi testified the club was formed 29 years ago but never improved its grounds except for farming. ‘It’s no longer profitable to farm the land,’ he said, ‘farming hasn’t even paid the property taxes,’” the Tribune reported in 1954.
Public records available through the Cook County assessor and recorder of deeds websites indicate homes in the 14600 block of Linder Avenue were built around 1960.
James Mondi, who died in 1960 at age 75, was a well-known gambler in Chicago during the 1920s, according to numerous newspaper accounts and several books about organized crime during that era.
Mondi ran a successful operation at The Ship, a club in Cicero, taking 25 percent of the profits until Al Capone moved in, according to the 2005 book, “After Capone: The Life and World of Chicago Mob Boss Frank ‘the Enforcer’ Nitti,” by Mars Eghigian.
“Mondi privately confided to a house cashier the futility of his situation in 1924: ‘Al Capone and his bunch have horned in and are going to take charge.’ That, in cold fact, is exactly what the Combine did,” the author wrote.
Mondi’s influence had diminished by the time he ran the club and developed houses in Bremen Township. In 1950, Chicago Crime Commission Operating Director Virgil W. Peterson mentioned Mondi in testimony before the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.
“During the heyday of the Capone regime James Mondi was one of the big shots in Al Capone’s gambling empire in Chicago, although in recent years he has not been very important,” Peterson testified.
When Mondi died a decade later, his grandson, Scott, was 6 years old and living in the house in the 14600 block of Long Avenue in unincorporated Bremen Township. It was the first home built west of Midlothian Country Club, he said.
“Jimmie Mondi is one of the few people in Al Capone’s inner circle to depart a leadership position in the Outfit with both his life and his money,” Mondi said.
Mondi said his grandmother, Florence — James Mondi’s widow — shared family stories with him. She died in 1983 at age 91, he said. He said his grandmother told him his grandfather sought to build a subdivision only because he was unable to open a casino at the Maple Farm club.
“No public mention was ever made of additional plans by Jimmie Mondi to open a gambling casino on the property,” Mondi said. “The back story is that the large main residence was lavishly renovated, equipped with thousands of dollars’ worth of gambling equipment and ready to open.
“Then one of the neighbors learned of Jimmie Mondi’s plans and objected,” Mondi said. “The neighbor used his influence to prevent the casino from ever opening. The neighbor’s family had an estate south of 147th Street across from the Midlothian Country Club.”
Mondi said his grandmother told him the neighbor who objected was a brother of Meigs, the aviation enthusiast and newspaper publisher.
Meigs had many influential friends, including William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford. He gave a flying lesson to President Harry S. Truman. At his funeral in Chicago, honorary pallbearers included three U.S. senators, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, the founder of the Bears and the then-owner of the Cubs.
It may be impossible to prove, but it seems plausible that Meigs could have used his influence to block Jimmie Mondi from opening a casino. If Mondi had been able to open a casino, he might not have ever sought county approval to rezone the land for a residential subdivision.
The historical accounts and family stories from decades ago reveal a rich past, but they don’t shed light on why officials today believe the 14600 block of Linder Avenue was never properly dedicated as a public road, and why they won’t plow the street or fill potholes.
It’s up to Bremen Township and Cook County officials who hold administrative and elected offices today to resolve that problem.
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