The name "Orchard Place," once held by a South Side Des Plaines neighborhood, is fading.

The name "Riverview" is gone.

Riverview was once a thriving community along the Des Plaines River that was absorbed into Des Plaines in 1925.

Orchard Place lasted longer. A sizable neighborhood on Des Plaines' far south side, it stayed independent, with its own school and school board, until the 1950s. Today it lives on mostly in the "ORD" tags on luggage flying to O'Hare, a nod to the small airfield called Orchard Field that pre-dated O'Hare on Touhy Avenue many years ago.

"I used to tell them the Sixth Ward could be self-sustaining," said Carmen Sarlo, the former Des Plaines alderman who represented the Orchard Place neighborhood on the city council.

"People would laugh. But, it's true."

The story of the Northwest suburbs represents a kind of suburban Darwinism - the fittest, or luckiest, towns survived. Others got absorbed and gradually all traces disappeared.

Ontarioville. Aptakisic. Half Day.

Ontarioville actually predated Hanover Park, but Hanover Park won the final battle, enveloping Ontarioville into itself.

Aptakisic, now part of Buffalo Grove, still lives in the name of the local school district, Aptakisic-Tripp. The Aptakisic post office was established in 1889 and disbanded in 1904.

Half Day, at Milwaukee Avenue and Route 22, survived until this decade, when it finally became a part of the expanding Vernon Hills.

Bad luck did in Riverview - factory closings and fires eventually led the population to wave the white flag.

"There's quite a bit of history here," Sarlo said. "There are a lot of old-timers here, but there are a lot of new people who don't even know the history."

When Des Plaines took over Orchard Place it got 800 homes, as well as prime commercial land, what's now the O'Hare Lake Office Center.

Communities that don't disappear are typically the ones near railroad lines or rivers, said Ann Keating, associate history professor at North Central College in Naperville. They also have a large industrial base or a long history of farming.

"The towns that in general have disappeared are the ones on the crossroads rather than the railroads," she said.

"Whether they incorporate and became separate governments certainly affects staying power," said Keating, who is contributing to an encyclopedia sponsored by the Chicago's Newberry Library on the history of the city and its suburbs.

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