Raw States
Des Plaines Fall Fest
Des Plaines, IL · Festival
- When
- September 18–20, 2026
- Where
- Lake Park, 2200 Lee St · Des Plaines · IL
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule
A free family festival at Lake Park next to Lake Opeka, with carnival rides, live music and vendor booths. Launched in 2009, the 2026 edition marks its 18th year as a fall tradition for the northwest suburb.
The history within reach
- Kroc's first McDonald's0.6 mi
Ray Kroc opened his McDonald's on April 15, 1955, day one of the corporation, though not the first franchise (that was Phoenix, 1953, under the McDonald brothers).
- The Breakfast Club1.5 mi
Five students serve a Saturday detention and become, briefly, honest with each other, filmed almost entirely inside a shuttered suburban high school, the library a set built on the gymnasium floor because the real one was too small.
Renamed for aviator Edward O'Hare in 1949, the airfield displaced Midway as the world's busiest by the early 1960s..
- 8213 West Summerdale5.0 mi
Police recovered twenty six bodies from the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy's ranch house in an unincorporated pocket of Norwood Park Township over the winter of 1978, and seven more elsewhere, most of them young men and boys the neighborhood contractor and party clown had hidden under his own floor.
In June 1981 the village trustees of this quiet Cook County suburb voted to outlaw the sale and possession of handguns inside village limits, something no American town had done before.