Like a proud old woman getting a facelift, a few tucks here and a little padding there, the old Du Page County Courthouse this summer quietly endured clouds of workers’ construction dust, the banging rattling of hammers and having its insides stripped away.
But now a metamorphosis has taken place. Gone are the county morgue and signs that say “No Guns Past This Door.”
The inside has been transformed into such things as a modern new library, a third-floor student center with a bird’s-eye view of Wheaton, and classrooms in old courtrooms. National-Louis University has moved in.
It’s a $3 million restoration and renovation that will take an 1896 structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places and give it new life with a future that seems fitting for such a classic old piece of architecture.
“The building has a collegiate look to it, and we want to preserve its historic stature and identity,” said Del Stoner, senior vice president of finance at National-Louis, which has several other locations.
Although students will begin coming to classes on Sept. 13, only the first phase of construction will be completed. Phase I renovation includes finishing off about two-thirds of the total usable space at the courthouse and bringing the building up to current fire codes.
During Phase II, which will take place through the summer of 1994, all the windows will be replaced. The ones replaced in the 1896 section, said Bill Roberts, director of administrative services, will be thermopanes for energy conservation but will have the look of a turn-of-the-century window.
“We have pictures of the building as it looked new. We’re going to even match the color of the window frames so you won’t know they’re modern windows. It will look like we found the old ones and put them back in,” said Roberts.
Also during this phase of construction the student center will be remodeled, a two-story atrium will connect the wings, and interactive video classrooms will be installed to connect with National-Louis’ other campuses and other colleges, such as College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn.
Phase III, in late ’94, will renovate space that is still being leased by Du Page County for a work-release program. Part of that area will be used for classrooms and labs and the remainder for administrative support services.
National-Louis has made it a priority to preserve the historic look of the courthouse, and that sits well with members of the community.
“The fact that they’re committed to the restoration of the courthouse is not only admirable but it’s linking education with the preservation of history,” said Susan Stob, director of the Du Page County Historical Museum in Wheaton. “I think it will be a tremendous addition to the community.”
Alberta Adamson, executive director of the Wheaton History Center, Wheaton’s local history museum, agreed.
“It’s going to be marvelous from a historical view that the building will be preserved and utilized at maximum use, and from an educational standpoint in that it’s wonderful to have another educational facility in town,” said Adamson.
Historians aren’t the only people thrilled by National-Louis moving into the old courthouse. Local merchants are ecstatic.
“We’re real excited,” said Dick Theobald, owner of Jack Straw Inc., a carry-out sandwich restaurant right across the street from the old building. “This whole part of town was kind of going nowhere fast, and now we’re looking forward to having thousands of people over there.”
Theobald had depended largely on the traffic at the courthouse for his business, and sales dropped off dramatically when the courthouse closed and moved to the west side of Wheaton with new facilitires and a new name: the Du Page County Judicial Center.
But even since construction workers have been there his business has increased, and he expects it to double when the students move in.
“I’m looking forward to that day,” he said.
So is Keith Carlson, manager of Carlson Glass in Wheaton and former president of Wheaton’s Downtown Business Association (DBA). Carlson is largely credited with organizing the effort to bring National-Louis to Wheaton, said Theobald.
“He did a lot to convince people in this town that we needed National-Louis,” said Theobald.
“We were persistent,” agreed Carlson. “The county seemed to be dragging its feet on what they were going to do with the buildings once they moved out to the fairgrounds area. We were worried they would just mothball the entire complex. So when we heard National-Louis was interested, we couldn’t think of a better use. It’s a great institution and has got good financial backing. We figured this was a good long-term solution, so we backed it.”
The DBA worked to convince county board members by attending county meetings, launching a petition drive and letter-writing campaign and holding a rally.
And it worked. The county eventually agreed to sell the building, plus the old state’s attorney’s building and the Win Knoch building for $3 million, which does not include renovation costs.
The DBA is anticipating the influx of students coming to town, with money jingling in their pockets. The DBA has already made up a welcoming packet to be handed out to students, complete with coupons and map of the downtown retail center.
“We’re really looking forward to the school opening up,” said Carlson.
But he’s not the only one. The students are thrilled, too. They will be moving from two cramped former elementary schools in Lombard into a much more spacious building. In fact, the new Wheaton Campus, as it is dubbed, has more than three times as much space. The combined square footage of the two elementary schools in Lombard was about 50,000 square feet. The new facility will have about 170,000 square feet.
Not only will the courthouse building be larger, but it will be more conducive to learning, said Carol Burgholzer, director of the Wheaton Campus.
One of the old elementary schools in Lombard was a leftover from the experimental open-classroom days, when many of the classrooms were separated only by movable dividers. Because of this, noise from other areas of the buildings carried into the classrooms. When someone was in the bathroom across the hall, for instance, you could hear their conversations and the running water of flushing toilets in the classrooms, said Burgholzer.
“I had a couple of meetings in some of these classrooms and realized how awful it must be (for the teachers) to compete with the noise,” she said.
During a tour of one of the buildings with its maze of small rooms, Burgholzer told a story of how a fellow education administrator called and asked that a half-hour be set aside to tour the Lombard facility.
Burgholzer said she laughed and told the woman, “About 35 seconds would be more like it.”
Tod Harper, a graduate student, said he also will be glad to leave the Lombard campus. Everything there was made for children, he said, because it was a former elementary school.
“We had sinks and drinking fountains down around our knees. It’ll be nice to have adult facilities,” he said.
Harper, who lives in Glendale Heights and is working on a master of arts in education, works in Wheaton and has been watching the progress of the renovation, anticipating taking classes there this fall.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “It’ll be real convenient.”
The school is also convenient for students who will be taking the train, said Lisa Stollard, a senior who is a member of the Student Advisory Council. The Wheaton campus will be within walking distance of two train stations in town.
“A lot of people are excited about that,” she said. The Bartlett resident, who is majoring in education, said she is also looking forward to a bigger and better library at the new campus.
“The library will be about three times bigger, and that will make it easier to do research and make materials more accessible,” she said.
National-Louis has had a presence in Du Page County since 1976 when it first held classes at North Central College. But it actually began in 1886 in Chicago as the National College of Education. It now has campuses in Evanston, downtown Chicago and the new site, and academic centers in Elgin; Milwaukee; Beloit, Wis.; St. Louis; McLean, Va.; Tampa; Atlanta; and Heidelberg, Germany. The campuses are self-supporting, containing administration offices and a library, plus classrooms, while the academic centers are off-site permanent locations where degree programs are taught.
The college serves 16,000 students annually at all locations, and the school anticipates that more than 1,000 of these will attend the Wheaton campus, where the majority of the students will range in age from 20 to 73, with 32 being the average enrollment age. There are no residence facilities included in the campus.
Faculty will include 35 teachers based full time at the Wheaton campus and 70 others, many of whom will divide their time with the other campuses.
Students at National-Louis study only in the junior and senior undergraduate levels (there are no freshman- or sophomore-level courses offered) or at graduate level in areas ranging from education and human services to management and adult education.
Orley Herron, president of National-Louis University, whose primary office is at the administative headquarters on the Evanston campus, is looking forward to setting up a satellite office in the courthouse building. That’s because he will now be just a stone’s throw from his alma mater, Wheaton College, which he will be able to see from his office window on his at least once-a-week visits to Louis’ Wheaton campus.
“I feel like I have returned home,” said Herron. “This town is part of my roots.”
And roots do run deep for many in Wheaton, who like to reminisce about the history of the old courthouse-how the county seat ended up in Wheaton after a fierce battle with Naperville, the former county seat, in 1867 when the electorate chose Wheaton over Naperville because of its central location in the county. The animosity between the two towns was so great that a rock-throwing incident occurred at that time, which left two men dead.
Wheaton immediately began building a wooden courthouse but Naperville still balked at giving up the reins of power. Business came to a halt, taxes went uncollected and county business went unattended, so after several months, Wheaton leaders stole down, so the story goes, in the middle of the night to retrieve the county records, and Wheaton has remained the county seat ever since.
The original courthouse, however, became too small as the population of Du Page County surged in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire. Plus, the building was deteriorating and deemed unsafe because of settling on one side where prisoners would dig tunnels attempting to escape.
A new courthouse was needed, and in 1896 architect M.E. Bell submitted plans for the present structure to be built of red granite, brick and terra cotta in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, topped with a clock tower six stories above the street that would make it the tallest building in the county. The interior would be trimmed in antique oak and would include frescoed walls, marble accents and an iron staircase.
Estimated costs to build it were nearly $75,000, but actual costs came in at just over $69,000.
In 1938, the white stone annex was built to house the state’s attorney’s office, and in 1952, two more floors were added on the back of the building to connect the courthouse with the new county jail.
Architect on the latest renovation of the courthouse is Williams-Pollack Associates Ltd. of Wheaton, which retained W.B. Olson of Northbrook as general contractor.
The transition between the county and the university went smoothly, said Arnold Kumorek, director of capital plant for Du Page County.
“They’ve been very cooperative working with us so that we can all get our business done with minimum interruption to everybody,” he said.
As an example, Bill Roberts, the director of administrative services for the college, cited the time a judge called up during the moving process and was upset because his secretary’s desk, which matched his own, hadn’t been moved. (National-Louis bought a lot of the furniture in the building along with the property.) The county offered to trade three desks for the secretary’s desk to appease the judge, Roberts said.
“We said, `Oh heck, just come over and look for it. If you can find it, take it,’ ” he said.
One of the biggest challenges in the renovation of the building, however, will be connecting the newer addition on the back of the courthouse, called the east wing, to the old jail building, the south wing, because the floor levels of the east wing do not meet the floor levels of the jail. Instead they zigzag until they reach the top floor. The problem will be solved by building new stairwells between the two structures topped with a skylight.
The renovation was also planned with the input of students and teachers.
“We asked them what they needed,” said Roberts.
“We like to think we’re oriented to their needs,” added Stoner.
And the town of Wheaton, likewise, wants to be accessible to the needs of the students.
Mayor James Carr said: “I am terribly excited for the city. National-Louis is a wonderful addition and the best way to use this location. It’s just the start of many new good things to come.”
