Inverness Village Hall

North of I-90 in the northwest Chicago suburbs, the all-too-busy four-lane Roselle Road, which is a north-south route, narrows to two lanes through the affluent community known as Inverness. Mid-morning earlier this week the sky was clear, the temps warm, and the trees and bushes and flowers along this narrow version of Roselle Road beamed full spring green. Spring is here.

And since Inverness is a low-density community, traffic was light. I buzzed along, catching the air from a half-opened window. Roselle Road ends, or at least has its northern terminus, at a street called Baldwin Road, which almost immediate connects with the Northwest Highway. That large thoroughfare does go northwest, but isn't a highway in the limited-access sense. Even better, it's actually US 14, the old Black and Yellow Trail. If I had time that I don't happen to have right now, I could head northwest on Northwest Highway and keep following the US highway signs until I reached Yellowstone National Park.

Right at the junction of Roselle and Baldwin, but hidden from view by tall trees from the traffic on the Northwest Highway, is the Inverness Village Hall. I'd never been all the way north on Roselle, so I'd never seen it, but there it was, with its four faux castle towers, surrounding a building with an insanely steep roof. Or maybe they're supposed to be silos; I didn't see any loopholes in the structure for defending the village hall.

As usual, Roadside America is on the job, and claims that the building used to have something to do with storing Al Capone's hooch, but I haven't independently confirmed that. As busy as he was, I doubt that Capone had time to be associated with all the structures in or near Chicago later claiming to be his. Besides, if you were storing illegal liquor, wouldn't you want to put it in a nondescript warehouse somewhere? Maybe I'll call the village and ask sometime. They probably love questions about Capone.