The first thing you need to know about Joliet is how to pronounce it. It is not, natives of this 158-year-old city will tell you emphatically, ”Jolly- et,” which is the way, they add, far too many Chicagoans say it.
It is rather ”Joe-lee-et,” as in Louis Jolliet, the French explorer, who in 1673 climbed a 60-foot-high, 9-acre limestone mound overlooking the Des Plaines River valley and declared the area to be fertile, filled with game and highly suitable for settlement.
But knowing how to say Joliet the city is only half the battle. You also need to know about the origin of Joliet the name, which is not as cut and dried as you might think.
So here`s a bit of local history trivia you might have missed in school.
It took some 150 years before anybody, other than the Native American Pottawatomies who had lived in the area for centuries, finally decided to take Monsieur Jolliet`s evaluation of the region seriously. As if that weren`t enough to exasperate the explorer`s Gallic spirit, when a settler named James B. Campbell first laid out the town in 1834, he dubbed it ”Juliet,” an English corruption of the French spelling (minus one ”l”) of that mound that Jolliet had climbed to survey the area.
To further complicate matters, up the river a ways a handful of other settlers who were laying out their own community figured as long as there was a ”Juliet nearby,” why not (you guessed it) name their town ”Romeo”? And that`s what they did.
So, there they were: the municipal Romeo and Juliet of the Illinois plains. While that may seem like a more romantic twinning of cities than, say, St. Paul and Minneapolis or Davenport and Moline, it never really captured the imagination of Joliet`s early settlers. For one thing, Romeo (now Romeoville) was too far away to be Juliet`s twin city, and for another, Juliet the city had nothing to do with Juliet the tragic Shakespearean heroine.
It took a presidential visit to convince the residents of Juliet that they should change the name, however. That happened in 1845 when President Martin Van Buren came to town and wondered out loud why it was called
”Juliet” when all the official maps showed that there was a ”Mt. Joliet” overlooking the place. Spurred on by that presidential puzzlement, local leaders that same year asked and received the state legislature`s permission to change the town`s name to Joliet (minus that ”l” again).
The name has remained the same over the years, but little else has in this city of 73,679.
Indeed, Joliet has gone through several incarnations since the mid-19th Century – from prairie trading post, to thriving river port, to booming industrial center and, not too long ago, to city on a respirator.
It has been a time during which Joliet has lived with several rather dreary-sounding labels, including Stone City, after the millions of tons of limestone quarried from under Mt. Joliet (Now long gone. Sorry, Monsieur Jolliet.)
It has also been called Steel City after the rolling mills and blast furnaces that once dominated the landscape.
And, of course, the bleakest moniker of all: Prison Town, after the old castle-like state prison built here in 1858. (The 67-year-old Stateville Penitentiary, Jolietians will quickly tell you, is not in Joliet, but in neighboring Crest Hill, five miles to the north.)
The one label Joliet has never been given is ”beautiful.” This was, after all, a city that came of age during last century`s industrial revolution when the more smokestacks a city had, the better. No matter that the steel mills, chemical plants and other factories fouled the air and streams and turned the landscape into something resembling a scrap heap. That was the price of progress.
So Joliet grew. But as it grew up, it also grew ugly.
Poet Carl Sandburg, who once described Chicago as ”Hog butcher for the world” and the ”city of big shoulders,” but offered at least some praise for its dynamism, was apparently much less impressed with Joliet when he penned his poem ”Joliet”:
On the one hand the steel works
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fe trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east . . .
Not exactly the kind of prose an image consultant might choose to lure visitors and new residents.
Yet Joliet, despite all its gloomy press, is a city very much concerned with its image. It wants desperately to be beautiful.
Can it? Well, anything is possible. Certainly if civic boosterism could be transformed into physical beauty, Joliet would already be the San Francisco of the plains. Platoons of city officials, local businessmen and civic-minded volunteers are hard at work on a face lift that would make Joan Rivers envious.
The most prominent bit of surgery is being performed on downtown Joliet. Once a roaring, robust center of commerce, downtown Joliet today seems asthmatic and frail.
As with many cities and towns across America, Joliet underwent a breathless period of ”malling” in the 1970s. Both the Louis Joliet and the Jefferson Square malls were thrown up on the periphery of Joliet within a few years of each other.
The impact was immediate and devastating. Businesses that had once been anchors for downtown Joliet, such as Sears and Kline`s, headed for the controlled environment of the malls, and within a few years the city center had all the personality and magnetism of Baghdad during an air raid.
Things got so bad that even the Rialto Theater, the ”Jewel of Joliet,”
which opened its doors on May 24, 1926, as one of America`s premier vaudeville movie palaces, was on the verge of being turned into a parking lot.
It took a major civic effort spearheaded by a local piano teacher named Dorothy Mavrich to save the old theater, which was designed by Chicago theater architects C.W. and George Rapp, who also built the Chicago Theatre and the State-Lake Theater. After eight years of arguing and cajoling and legal maneuvering, the theater was saved, restored to its opening day glory and has since been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
”When I was growing up in the 1960s, I used to go here to the movies,”
recalled Gayle Crnkovic, who now works for the theater publicizing its live, on-stage performances that have recently included the likes of Mel Torme, Maureen McGovern, Eddy Arnold, Anne Murray, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Oak Ridge Boys and Boots Randolph.
”I just couldn`t imagine tearing something like this down, could you?”
she continued, as she showed a guest through the 1,920-seat theater with its 18 free-standing scagliola columns; its Barton Grande Theatre Pipe Organ, the largest Barton Grande still in use in an American theater; and its 22-foot-long ”Duchess,” the largest hand-cut chandelier in America. (Those who have seen ”The Babe,” the recent film biography of Babe Ruth starring John Goodman, saw the Rialto`s impressive lobby in several scenes that were supposed to be in the lobby of a Boston hotel.)
Like many who grew up in Joliet 30 or more years ago, Crnkovic could also not imagine that some day downtown Joliet would be gasping for breath.
”I used to work at Kline`s when I was 16,” Crnkovic said. ”Everybody came downtown in those days. Downtown Joliet was alive . . . vibrant . . . something was always going on.”
Those words, heard again and again from Joliet natives, are like arrows in the heart for Joliet`s civic leaders, who have responded with several plans to resuscitate the downtown area.
It has not been an overnight process. It began back in the early 1980s when several Joliet business and civic leaders such as Frank Turk Jr. decided something had to be done before Joliet died of terminal homeliness.
”We hit the low point in Joliet`s history between 1981 and 1983,” said Turk, the third generation to operate the 100-year-old Turk Furniture Co. in downtown Joliet. ”We knew we had to do something drastic.”
Indeed, by 1983 unemployment in Joliet topped the nation at 26.5 percent, compared to about a 7 percent average nationally, as thousands of people were thrown out of work during a record rash of plant closings.
Joliet, like many cities in the Midwestern Rust Belt, was the victim not only of international competition but also of an industrial mugging staged by several Southern states such as North and South Carolina. Economic development specialists from the South were able to coax Joliet industries to their section of the country with promises of new facilities, lower taxes, low interest loans and lots of official assistance.
”Places like Chicago and Joliet were easy targets for us,” said Ruth C. Fitzgerald. ”Joliet didn`t know which way it wanted to go. Its industries were there for the taking.”
And take them Fitzgerald did. For many of the 19 years she spent at the economic development council of Spartanburg, S.C., her job was to coax Midwestern companies to pack up and head south. Fitzgerald was good at her work. Too good.
”She was killing us,” recalled Turk. ”She knew all about us, about our weaknesses . . . so we thought, why not hire her to help us.”
That stroke of collective genius occurred in 1985. Today, as president and CEO of the Will County Chamber of Commerce and the Will County Center for Economic Development Foundation, Fitzgerald has spearheaded a recovery drive that businessmen here say borders on the miraculous.
Since she arrived, Fitzgerald and her staff of 13 have coaxed 525 new companies to set up operations in Joliet, a feat that has resulted in the creation of 13,500 net jobs. Construction on a new 380-acre, $200 million business-industrial park called Rock Run along Interstate Highway 80 is about to begin, and Joliet will be the first Illinois city to have two riverboat gambling casinos: one in the city center, run by Harrah`s Hotels and Casinos, and the other just three miles from downtown, operated by Fitzgerald`s Casino/ Hotel of Las Vegas.
The infusion of new business and industry has included Crossfield Chemicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever, and Coilplus-Illinois Inc., a division of Japan`s Mitsubishi Corp. which located a steel processing center and its Midwest headquarters in Will County.
But under an economic development master plan that calls for recession-proofing Joliet and Will County with a heavy dose of economic
diversification, the influx has also included a variety of small businesses such as TnT`s, a sports bar owned by Bears offensive lineman Tom Thayer, and the Swanson Harp Co., a five-employee, labor-intensive operation that has an international reputation for turning out top-quality $27,000 harps.
”I had a preconceived image about Joliet . . . that it was going to be this big hick town,” admits Pat Dougal, a partner in the Swanson Harp Co.
”But since I`ve been here, I`ve learned that it isn`t like that at all.”
There`s that ”i” word again: image.
”The biggest obstacle we have is image,” says James M. Haller, director of Joliet`s community and economic development department. ”People who have never been here think all we have to offer is prisons and smokestacks.”
You can see the fire in Joliet city manager John M. Mezera`s eyes when he talks about Joliet`s image.
”I don`t care who you are and what your image of Joliet is,” he says.
”If you come here and spend an hour, I can overcome the image problem with one visit. Marketing is critical. You have to draw people down here and take them on a tour of the city. Then they are sold.”
What sells many visitors are the bargain-basement prices for new homes that may cost as much as $40,000 more up the road in Du Page County communities such as Naperville and Wheaton.
Joliet has annexed some 3,800 acres of land in the past two years, Mezera says. The affordable land means that at developments such as Riverbrook Estates, Springview West, Autumn Lakes and Warwick, single-family homes can be purchased for anywhere from $95,000 to $170,000. In Joliet`s Picardy development you can find new upscale luxury homes in the $250,000 to $350,000 range.
Much of Joliet`s older housing stock consists of rambling 100-year-old Victorians, and downtown buyers are snapping up a large number of these homes, many of which overlook the Des Plaines River and the Illinois Deep Waterway Canal.
Many of these elegant old houses are selling in the $125,000 to $175,000 range and are then being renovated to bring them up to 20th Century standards. City manager Mezera lives in one such restored home on a tree-lined street that is reminiscent of a scene from a Sinclair Lewis novel.
”What I like about Joliet is the feeling that you are not in some amorphous, overgrown, overcrowded suburb,” said Terry Pickett, who is in the process of moving to Joliet from the Arlington Heights area. ”You walk around downtown – and I grant you there isn`t a whole lot there right now – but nevertheless you walk around and you get a kind of hometown feeling. You can feel the energy here. Joliet is coming back fast and I want to be part of that.”
So does Ruth Fitzgerald.
”Downtown Joliet is the centerpiece of Will County,” she says. ”It`s the county seat. We have to do something about it and we are.”
A City Center plan was adopted in July of 1990 and a $14 million bond issue was approved last June for several renovation projects, including a west side riverwalk, streetscapes meant to invoke Joliet`s turn-of-the century ambience, decorative lighting on the city`s historic bright green lift bridges, a docking facility for the riverboat gaming concession and several neighborhood improvement projects.
Already finished is a $6 million renovation of historic Union Station and a $7 million restoration of the Joliet Public Library, which was designed by renowned Chicago architect Daniel J. Burnham.
”For a long time, people didn`t feel comfortable coming downtown,” says Frank Turk Jr. ”It was old, rundown, lifeless. I think things have bottomed out. You can feel downtown Joliet coming back to life again.”
And, of course, that`s more than you can say for Juliet.
