Arlington Park's rebirth

Chicago Tribune

04-05-2025

One week before his inauguration as the new mayor of Arlington Heights, Jim Tinaglia walked through the downtown streets he's called home for more than 50 years. What was once a 'sleepy little town,' as he described it, has become a bustling community, a place Tinaglia has had a hand in building, himself, through his work as an architect.
He'd built 'at least a dozen' places here over the past 35 years.
Banks. Restaurants.
'And that one,' he said pointing across the street to the old general store that he'd helped turn into a popular tavern and grill. If there'd been a constant amid all the growth in one of Chicago's largest suburbs it was probably the horse racing track a little ways northwest of downtown, the one now locked away and waiting for new life. For decades, Arlington Park had been a deeply-ingrained part of the culture here, and a source of pride.
'Our identity,' Tinaglia said of the track. 'For 100 years.'
Now it will be his mission, when he's sworn in as mayor Monday, to lead Arlington Park's rebirth — to complete the long, winding journey of bringing the Chicago Bears to Arlington Heights. It's a large part of why he ran for mayor, and also why he believes he was elected: to finish a deal that has proven elusive since a rush of early momentum, and to help convince Bears leadership, once and for all, that they should move from Chicago to the northwest suburbs.
At times, such a decision has appeared imminent. More often, it feels far off. In 2023, two years after Arlington Park hosted its final horse race, the Bears bought the 326-acre property and demolished the iconic grandstand along with several other buildings. Since then, what was once known as Arlington International Racecourse has sat mostly undisturbed, fading history behind rusting locked gates. Desolation and an unending quiet has replaced the old roars of the track.
It had life, for a long time. Both Citation and Secretariat triumphed at Arlington Park after winning the Triple Crown. In 1996, 34,000 gathered to watch Cigar win his 16th consecutive race, tying a record Citation set in 1950. When the track closed it created an immeasurable void, though visions of a revival came soon enough when talks with the Bears grew more serious.
The franchise's purchase of the property became official months after the Bears released a 'preliminary master plan vision' of what a move to Arlington Park might look like. It included a domed stadium surrounded by a hall of fame, a store and a tailgating green, with an expansive entertainment district nearby. The kind of place to host Super Bowls, Final Fours, big college football games, concerts. The kind of place that would be a year-round destination.
That's what Tinaglia wants, and envisions. For years, the possibilities at Arlington Park have enthralled him and other local leaders. But amid a property tax dispute and a prolonged period of due diligence, by the Bears and the village, little has happened.
When the Arlington Heights Village Board gathered for its most recent meeting on April 21, trustees bid farewell to outgoing Mayor Thomas Hayes, who had spent parts of every day, for almost four years, working on bringing the Bears to the village. Hayes in his farewell remarks expressed confidence that it would happen but lamented the ever-expanding timeline.
'I was hoping that we'd have a shovel in the ground by the time I left office,' he said, 'but I feel very, very confident that this new board is going to continue working very hard, as this board and our staff has done, to make that dream of a certain NFL team having their stadium here in our village for the next 50 years, a reality.'
Tinaglia, a village trustee since 2013, sat behind Hayes and listened. As an architect, he'd developed a trained eye. He shared the vision the Bears produced in their early renderings, and saw even more than that. He saw the restaurants and hotels and shops, the domed multipurpose football stadium anchoring it all, but also … a baseball stadium too? A new home for the White Sox?
He floated the possibility recently, in jest. But there was some truth there too.
'I'd really love to see it happen,' he said.
And now here comes his chance to lead the transformation.
A survivor becomes mayor
How long might that transformation take?
'The real answer is it's not my timeline,' Tinaglia said.
In the most optimistic scenario for a Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, there could be a groundbreaking in 2026. Maybe, if things go quickly, the Bears could be playing in Arlington Park by the end of the decade.
'It'll take a year to get through all of the approval processes,' he said.
Tinaglia — the 'g' in his last name is silent — knows about such things. He has spent the entirety of his adult life as a designer and builder, working in a profession that he described as a combination of art and science. Now 63 with short silver hair and focused, serious blue eyes, Tinaglia moved with his family from Berwyn to Arlington Heights in 1971 when he was in fourth grade.
After a high school teacher inspired an interest in drawing and creating, Tinaglia paid his way through school at Iowa State, tending bar and working as a grocery store clerk. He returned to Arlington Heights in 1985, as he'd planned, and was tending bar at the Snuggery in Mount Prospect on the Sunday the Bears won the Super Bowl.
'It was wild,' Tinaglia said, and a good day to be a bartender in greater Chicagoland.
Finalizing the deal with the Bears in the coming months, or years, presents a challenge he believes he's built to handle. He has run his Arlington Heights architecture firm for 34 years, steering it through the late-2000s financial crisis that decimated his staff and shut down several projects. Then came a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2016 and the quick removal of the tumor.
'It just knocks you to your knees when you hear those words,' he said.
He's a survivor. These days, business is good and Tinaglia sometimes lets loose in his band Exit 147, named in honor of the family's cottage in Wisconsin. He plays the guitar, with one of his sons on the drums and another as the vocalist. They play a lot of '80s and '90s hits.
'We do Bon Jovi, we do Metallica, we do Poison,' Tinaglia said. 'We do Three Doors Down. Everything.'
He has his band and his business, his wife of 37 years, four children and four grandchildren. He didn't need to be mayor but said he felt strongly about serving. And particularly about having a leading say in Arlington Park.
Tinaglia fits the archetype of small-town mayor — the kind who knows everybody — but Arlington Heights is hardly that small of a town anymore. What happens with the Bears, or what doesn't happen, will shape the village for decades to come.
Perhaps it takes an Arlington Heights lifer to understand. Tinaglia is. So was Hayes, the outgoing mayor. They know well what it's been like since the racetrack closed. Both men often wear small circular pins with the village logo: the head of a racehorse rising out of the letter A.
'We were very proud of the racetrack,' Hayes said, adding that 'if I had my druthers' it never would've shut down.
In Arlington Heights, the pursuit of the Bears is as much about filling that void as it is about anything else. There's nearly 330 acres of possibility.
'My expectation,' Tinaglia said, 'is that the next 100 years are equal to the last 100 years, or better.'
The only catch: It's not necessarily his deal to close.
'The Arlington Heights Bears'
Tinaglia has made his living on turning renderings into reality and not long ago he conducted a crude experiment on Google Earth. He zoomed into Kansas City, where the Royals and Chiefs play in stadiums separated by a small parking lot.
'Pick those up,' he said, and 'carry them over here to Arlington Heights. Those two stadiums fit inside the racetrack. Now, the racetrack over there is just a tiny little piece of 326 acres.'
He does not envision another version of a downtown in Arlington Park. No condos or homes. The idea is to create 'a place for people to visit, enjoy, experience, spend money and then leave. And then the next people would come, enjoy, spend money and then leave.'
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The view from the neighborhood northeast of the former Arlington International Racecourse on Dec. 30, 2024, in Arlington Heights. The Chicago Bears currently own the property and could potentially build a stadium there. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
And that's why, Tinaglia said, 'I said what I said about the White Sox' — because what better way to keep people coming back than to be a year-round destination: Bears, White Sox, a full calendar of big events.
Whether any of it comes close to fruition is up to the Bears, whose leadership is also considering remaining downtown. The lakefront site south of Soldier Field — a state-of-the-art domed stadium that Bears President Kevin Warren and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson hyped at a splashy news conference last spring — remains in the realm. The former Michael Reese Hospital property in Bronzeville is a potential, but unlikely, option too.
And then there's Arlington Park, which has been on the franchise's radar for more than 50 years.
In early April, Warren met with reporters during the NFL owners meetings in Palm Beach, Florida, and spoke highly of the team's options. He gushed about the possibilities at the park, and what he described as a 'beautiful piece of land that has the great topography' with Salt Creek dividing the property.
'You can actually see downtown from there,' he said.
Warren is among a triumvirate of Bears leadership that forged relationships with Hayes, who began the first of his three mayoral terms in 2013. Karen Murphy, the Bears' executive vice president of stadium development & chief operating officer — Hayes referred to her as the 'stadium guru' — is another, along with George McCaskey, the chairman and controlling owner.
It was McCaskey's father, Ed, who began the Bears' longtime flirtation with Arlington Heights in 1970. By 1975, when discussions were serious, the elder McCaskey said, 'We're very bullish on moving to Arlington Heights.'
Richard J. Daley, then the Chicago mayor, famously pushed back hard against the move.
'Like hell they will,' he said. 'They can use the name Arlington Heights Bears, but they'll never use the name of Chicago, if I'm the mayor.'
Fifty years later, there's still a simmering tension. Johnson and the city's leadership will undoubtedly do what they can to keep the Bears in Chicago, though the franchise's proposed mixed-use site along the lakefront would cost an estimated $4.7 billion — a figure which could go even higher while the long-term cost to taxpayers remains unclear.
In Arlington Heights the Bears have agreed to pay for the construction of the stadium but the village would be responsible for the surrounding infrastructure. Hayes said local leaders are still 'not exactly sure how much that will be or, where that income or money would come from.' Village officials are hoping for clarity and help from the state legislature, though the Bears and the new stadium proposal have been met with a wall in Springfield.
Gov. JB Pritzker has been skeptical of taxpayer-supported sporting venues, saying any public dollars must be a net positive for Illinois citizens. There have been discussions about changing the state law to facilitate the Arlington Heights project, including a complex property tax break and a potential ticket tax to win support from Chicago lawmakers who would need a reason to vote for the team's departure from the city.
Hayes hoped all of this would be settled under his watch. But at 68, with two grandkids, he says he believed it was time. He endorsed Tinaglia as his successor because Tinaglia had become the town's senior trustee but also because 'he knows this community, loves this community,' Hayes said.
After Hayes' final Village Board meeting, there was a going-away reception. The outgoing mayor was pleased to see someone who'd become a familiar acquaintance in recent years: George McCaskey.
'It's a reflection of the good relationship that we've developed and, I think, their desire to land here,' Hayes said. 'It's not a done deal. But again, I'm very encouraged where we're at.'
'Ihat is their baby'
The day after Tinaglia won the mayoral election, Warren and McCaskey met with reporters at the owners meetings. Warren praised Hayes and said he'd already reached out to Tinaglia to congratulate him.
McCaskey, meanwhile, reiterated that despite the delays in Arlington Heights — where the Bears and the village last November reached an agreement on a property tax evaluation that first prompted the franchise to recoil — the old racetrack property remains an attractive site.
Does it remain the leading site?
'George Halas identified it more than 50 years ago as an ideal place for a Bears stadium,' McCaskey said of his grandfather. 'I don't know if anything that's happened since then changed that evaluation.'
The Bears' decision will be based on several factors, with finances likely at the forefront, but relationships will be sure to play a role too. In the weeks since the election, Tinaglia has tried to establish his own bonds. He has met with Warren and McCaskey, he said, and 'had some really great conversations' with both. He acknowledged that 'they're concerned about taxes.'
'But the good news is, we've gotten to hash through that a little bit. And I think that they're happier with where that landed,' he said.
Still, there is much to be worked out. The architect in Tinaglia, at times, has a hard time containing his enthusiasm for the Bears' potential arrival, though he made clear that 'I don't want to meddle in the design of their stadium.'
'That is their baby, as it should be,' he said. 'I am more interested in how it fits on the site.'
In the weeks leading to his swearing-in, his inbox has been filling up with messages from fellow citizens of Arlington Heights, which has grown from the sleepy village of Tinaglia's boyhood to a thriving community with a robust core full of restaurants and gathering spaces. It's a place that has lived up to Hayes' personal motto: 'Quality of life in Arlington Heights is second to none.'
Half of the people he hears from, Tinaglia said, are all-in on the pursuit of the Bears — 'to the point where (it's) 'Give them whatever they want,'' he said. 'And there's another half of the people that are worried. They're worried that, what if they come?
'What will happen to their comfort level in our town?'
He has tried to appease those concerns and emphasize the possibilities. Not just Bears home games, but major events. The vision goes beyond a stadium but encapsulates a space, accessible by train and with easy access to highways, that Tinaglia and other local leaders believe would be a boon to Arlington Heights and to the larger metropolitan area for decades to come.
Tinaglia can see it, as he has envisioned many projects throughout his career.
'A world-class destination,' he said.
He begins his term as mayor with the mandate of making it a reality.