page_title: U.S. Route 66 in Illinois
section_title: Welco Corners to Chicago
hierarchical_section_title: U.S. Route 66 in Illinois / Route description / Welco Corners to Chicago
caption_attribution_description: Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket in Willowbrook (1946). It was a popular lunch stop along Route 66. The story goes that two women entered a gas station in 1938, offering to trade their recipe for fried chicken in exchange for a promise to use their chickens to make it. The Chicken Basket originally operated out of this gas station at a lunch counter, but became popular enough to warrant a new building in 1946. During winters, owner Irv Kolarik would flood the roof of the restaurant and hire local youths to skate on top of it.
context_page_description: U.S. Route 66 was a United States Numbered Highway in Illinois that connected St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois. The historic Route 66, the Mother Road or Main Street of America, took long distance automobile travelers from Chicago to Southern California. The highway had previously been Illinois Route 4 and the road has now been largely replaced with Interstate 55. Parts of the road still carry traffic and six separate portions of the roadbed have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_section_description: From Welco Corners in Bolingbrook to Indian Head Park, I-55 was built on top of much of old US 66.  Here, Route 66 passed through what is now Woodridge, Darien, Willowbrook and Burr Ridge—none of which were in existence in 1926 when the route was created and did not come into existence as suburbs until the late 1950s through late 1960s.  The stretch from Darien northeast through what is now Countryside and Hodgkins was then part of a large rural farmland collectively known as Lyonsville, as the eastern end of it was located in Lyons Township in Cook County. This section of mainline I-55 is today signed as Historic US 66, though inconsistently so, making it difficult for travelers to follow along the original 1926 path; however, a section of the original highway that now serves as the two-way north frontage road in Darien, Willowbrook and Burr Ridge retains the old Route 66 feel.  The original path is slightly difficult to follow here, due to swings north around the I-55 interchanges between Lemont Road and County Line Road, but not impossible, and taking the north frontage road leads travelers past several sites of historic interest, including Cass Cemetery and the former Martin B. Madden mansion known as Castle Eden (now a Carmelite priory) in Darien as well as the International Harvester experimental fields in Burr Ridge (once known as Harvester, Illinois after the plant located there).
  Near the Cass Avenue instersection, Route 66 and I-55 pass by the northern edge of the Argonne National Laboratory campus. A mile or so further east near the IL 83 interchange, Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket in Willowbrook is still a popular stop for motorists on the route, although being cut off from the Interstate did cost it a significant amount of business after I-55 was built and during the 1960s through 1980s. At the Indian Head Park interchange with I-294 (Tri-State Tollway), I-55 separates from US 66 to follow a more southerly route as the Stevenson Expressway while Historic US 66 continues eastward on Joliet Road, passing by the historic Lyonsville Congregational Church at Wolf Road and traversing Countryside, Hodgkins and McCook.
  The original path of Route 66 on Joliet Road intersects the overlapping US 12/US 20/US 45 at LaGrange Road in Countryside before touching the edge of Hodgkins near East Avenue.  A brief stretch of Route 66 in McCook between East Avenue and 55th Street west of First Avenue has been permanently damaged by a local quarry and is closed, and Historic US 66 detours onto East Avenue north to 55th Street east before intersecting again with Joliet Road.  The detour around the quarry is well marked. In McCook, the route passes by the former Snuffy's 24-Hour Grill, now restored and transformed into the Steak N Egger on Route 66.
  The route continues northeast on Joliet Road through McCook and Lyons, then jogs north briefly onto Harlem Avenue to Ogden Avenue in Berwyn, where it meets US 34. From Berwyn, Route 66 continues northeast on Ogden Avenue past the Berwyn Route 66 Museum, passing through Cicero before entering Chicago on a diagonal and progressing through the Greater Lawndale area, where it divides North Lawndale from South Lawndale before moving through Douglas Park, the Tri-Taylor Historic District and the Illinois Medical District on the Near West Side.
  Turning due east from Ogden Avenue once north of the I-290 (Eisenhower Expressway), Route 66 moves through the Jackson Boulevard Historic District toward the Chicago Loop via Jackson Boulevard.  After a construction project during the early- to mid-1950s temporarily designated Jackson Boulevard as one-way east, Jackson Boulevard became one way eastbound permanently in 1955; thus, Route 66 from the West Loop through the downtown area was split, with the westbound lanes relocated to Adams Street.
  The eastern endpoint of US 66 was always at US 41. The original 1926 terminus was at Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue, as Michigan Avenue was designated US 41 in 1926.  However, when US 41 through most of Chicago was relocated to Lake Shore Drive in 1938, Route 6
caption: Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket in Willowbrook, listed on the National Register of Historic Places
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