Lilacia Park Expansion in Lombard: Plans and Next Steps

Why has the grass at the corner of Maple Street and Park Avenue sat behind a plain wood fence for two years, growing in but going nowhere?

Anyone who walks or drives past Lilacia Park in downtown Lombard has seen it: a quiet, fenced rectangle of new turf tucked against one of the most photographed gardens in DuPage County, doing nothing in particular while the lilacs and tulips next door draw thousands of visitors every spring. It looks like a stalled project. It is actually the last page of a negotiation that started before most of today's Lombard residents were born, and the next chapter is being written right now, on a timeline the park district itself has just updated.

Three Times the Park District Said Yes

Lilacia Park exists because Colonel William Plum left his lilac collection to the village when he died in 1927, and the Lombard Park District hired Danish landscape architect Jens Jensen to lay out the grounds the following year. Jensen's 1930 design gave the park its flagstone paths, a limestone waterfall and pool, and the prairie-style plantings that still structure the garden today. That footprint, 8.5 acres, has not grown since.

The Helen M. Plum Memorial Library sat right next to it, inside what had been the Plum family home, until the 1960s, when the library outgrew the space. The park district gave up land for a new 12,000-square-foot library building. In the late 1970s, the library asked again, this time for a 22,000-square-foot addition, and the park district agreed a second time, on one condition: the air rights above that new construction would stay with the park district, protecting the sightlines and sunlight around the historic Coach House, one of the only original structures left from the Plum estate. In 2008, the park district handed over a driveway too. Three requests, three yeses, over roughly 45 years.

The fourth request is why the lot has been empty.

The Request That Didn't Work, Then a Deal That Did

In 2016, Lombard voters approved a property tax increase so the library could build again on the same Maple Street site, and this time the library wanted to go taller. The park board pushed back. A taller building risked shading the horticultural collection and threatening the Coach House foundation, and the 1978 air rights agreement gave the park district standing to say no. What followed was three years of competing proposals and public statements between two elected boards, each insisting the other was the obstacle.

The standoff ended with a different answer entirely. Rather than expand on the same corner, the library board built somewhere else, a new $27.7 million, two-story building at 411 South Main Street that opened to the public over an April 2023 weekend. In exchange, the library agreed to hand its old Maple Street site over to the park district, and the Village of Lombard took ownership of the library's former parking lot, as part of a three-way agreement that had been on the table for years.

Demolition of the old library came in early 2024. By December of that year, the transfer of the cleared land to the park district was final, and the temporary split-rail fence went up so new grass could establish itself through a full growing season.

Here is the number that makes this more than a routine land transfer: the site being added is 1.2 acres, next to a park that has held steady at 8.5 acres since 1930. That is close to a 14 percent increase in Lilacia Park's footprint, its first real expansion in nearly a century, and it is happening on the exact spot where a taller library building was once proposed and rejected. The corner that could have become 22,000 more square feet of library is becoming part of the park instead.

What Happens on That Grass Now

The park district held public open houses in July 2025 at Sunset Knoll Recreation Center to gather resident input on what the new ground should become. The concept that came out of those sessions centers on gardens, pathways, communal gathering space, and improved accessibility, additions in keeping with what Jensen built rather than a break from it.

As of the park district's own project update, posted in late August 2026, design work is nearing its end and moving into construction documentation from September through December of this year. No construction start date has been announced yet. What is confirmed is that the historic core of the park, the Coach House, the lilac collection, the 1930 pathways, is not part of this construction scope. This is an addition to Lilacia Park, not a renovation of it.

Park district Executive Director Joe McCann has described the cleared sightline down Maple Street as an opportunity to add another prominent entrance to the park, now that the old library building no longer blocks the view of the Coach House. That framing matters for anyone picturing what changes: this reads less like new infrastructure competing with the park's identity and more like the park finally getting room to breathe on a side that had been built over for sixty years.

None of this touches Lombard's spring tradition. Lilac Time still runs its parade, its tulip and lilac tastings, its Lilac Queen coronation, and the return of the park's Bloom-O-Meter each May, all inside the original 8.5 acres Jensen laid out. The park's holiday lights display, which runs from early December through New Year's Day with its gingerbread house and evening train, uses that same historic ground too. Whatever gets built at Maple and Park Avenue over the next year is meant to sit alongside those traditions, not inside them.

For residents who want to track the project as it moves from documentation into construction, the Lombard Park District posts updates directly on its Lilacia Park development page, and its Board of Park Commissioners meets the fourth Tuesday of every month at Sunset Knoll Recreation Center, open to anyone who wants to hear the next update firsthand.

The fence is still up. The grass is still just grass. But after nearly a decade of dispute and two more years of quiet groundwork, the corner next to Lilacia Park is closer to becoming something than it has been at any point since the old library came down.

If you've spent time in downtown Lombard and you're curious how a change like this fits into the bigger picture of the neighborhood, Jay Stallone knows this stretch of the western suburbs well enough to talk through what it means for the block, not just the blueprint. Let's Connect.