3D ultrasound Cicero

Cicero, IL, is located about 6 miles from downtown Chicago and 6 miles from First Peek Ultrasound, in Oak Park, IL, and it takes about 15 minutes to drive from Cicero to Oak Park. The town of Cicero is bordered on the north and on the east by Chicago, and so it is considered to be the suburb nearest to downtown Chicago. However, Oak Park is directly west of downtown Chicago, so Oak Park is probably the suburb closest to downtown Chicago. Cicero is named for the town of Cicero, New York, which in turn was named for Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator. Cicero has the only town form of government in Cook County, and is governed by a board of trustees. Present-day Cicero, 5.5 square miles, is less than one-sixth of its original 36 square-mile area. Originally, Cicero Township occupied six times its current territory. (Cicero used to run from Harlem Avenue to Western Avenue and from Pershing Road to North Avenue.) Weak political leadership and town services resulted in cities such as Oak Park and Berwyn voting to split off from Cicero, and other portions such as Austin were annexed into the city of Chicago.

Cicero's position at the edge of Chicago attracted criminal elements wishing to evade Chicago's law enforcement agencies. Al Capone built his criminal empire in Chicago before moving to Cicero to escape the reach of Chicago police.

Cicero has long had a reputation of government scandal. Most recently, in 2002, Town President Betty Loren-Maltese was sent to federal prison for eight years for misappropriating funds through an insurance scam that cost the town $12 million. She was well-liked by retired, long-term Cicero residents, but was continually challenged by younger Hispanic opponents before her indictment. Her prison term has recently ended and she now works as a waitress at Salerno's Pizza in Oak Park!

Racial tensions surfaced in Cicero throughout the 1950s and 1960s when residents resisted African Americans moving into their community. Cicero was taken up and abandoned several times as a site for a civil rights march in the mid-1960s. The American Friends Service Committee, the Rev. Martin Luther King, and many affiliated organizations, including churches, were conducting marches against housing and school de facto segregation and inequality in Chicago and several suburbs, but the leaders feared too violent a response in Chicago Lawn and Cicero. Eventually, a substantial march (met by catcalls, flying bottles and bricks) was conducted in Chicago Lawn, but only a splinter group, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson, marched in Cicero. At the end of the twentieth century, although Cicero had virtually no black residents, people of Hispanic or Asian ancestry contributed to its mixture of ethnic cultures. Ethnic tensions surfaced in town politics as an entrenched Republican organization reluctantly shared power with an emerging Hispanic majority. The picture above shows the recent groundbreaking of the Roosevelt Road streetscape (September 2010), which prominently shows the leadership of Cicero to include a variety of races and ethnicities. Cicero has come a long way.