Conrad Sulzer Regional Library

The current building was designed in 1985 by the architectural firm of Hammond Beeby and Babka, now known as Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, Inc. Lead partner and Driehaus Prize winner, Thomas Hall Beeby (born 1941), was an Oak Park, Illinois, native who also was an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1973–1980) and director of the College of Architecture at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (1980–?). Its German neo-classical style reflects the local Germanic culture of its namesakes,^[4] as well as Chicago's noted German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.^[5] The same firm also designed the Harold Washington Library.^[6]

The $5.5 million, 65,000 square feet (6,000 m²) building replaced the Frederick H. Hild Regional Library,^[7][8] named for the second librarian of the Chicago Public Library, who secured its first permanent home (now the Chicago Cultural Center).^[9] The Hild Library's 1929 Art-Deco style building (a block away and half the size of its replacement) became a landmark and later a branch of the Old Town School of Folk Music.^[10] Alderman Eugene Schulter (47th ward) was instrumental in getting funding and political support for the new library, which opened to the public on September 14, 1985. Much of the library's furniture was custom-made with a German mythological theme.

Conrad Sulzer (1804-1873) was born in Busenwang, Switzerland, in Thurgau Canton in northeastern Switzerland, the family having lived near Winterthur since before 1300^[11] His father was a local Protestant minister. He studied locally and at Bonn University and Heidelberg University and initially planned to become a doctor or pharmacist. He received an apothecary's certificate in Winterthur, but never actually practiced either career. In 1833 he traveled to France and then the United States, first settling in the Swiss colony in Watertown, New York. He married Christine Young and applied for U.S. citizenship. They had their first child (Frederick) three months before they traveled via a Great Lakes steamboat for the new boom town of Chicago in 1836. The following year Sulzer realized his passion for horticulture and bought 100 acres north of the new town at the intersection of Green Bay Road (that became Clark Street) and what became Irving Park Road. His personal library was the first on Chicago's North Side. Sulzer would sell acreage that became Graceland Cemetery (est. 1859) and to the Ravenswood Land Company (which developed the area beginning in 1868). Many people from Luxemburg fled European turmoil in the 1840s and settled near Sulzer's farm on a ridge above the North Branch of the Chicago River, and also established truck farms to serve the growing city of Chicago. Lake View became the first area developed outside Chicago's city limits, although it would ultimately be annexed.

Both the senior and junior Sulzer held numerous elected local offices. When Lake View township was organized in 1857, Conrad Sulzer was its first assessor (having since 1855 served in that position for the Township of Ridgeville). Before his death in 1892, Frederick was elected Lake View township clerk (beginning in 1867), highway commissioner (1868), town supervisor (1875) and served on the township board of education for 16 years, as well as helped install the area's first water purification plant. His son (Conrad's grandson) Albert Sulzer would graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead the Eastman Kodak Company until his death in 1944. The family's elegant 11-room farmhouse at 4233 N. Greenview Avenue, constructed by Frederick Selzer Jr. in 1886 was still standing in 1988, although sold after the Trinity Seminary and Bible College moved to suburban Bannockburn.^[12] A local road was named after Sulzer (renamed "Montrose Avenue" in 1892) as would be a school. The estate of Grace Sulzer established a foundation which provided grants to numerous local organizations.