As far as urban renewal goes, Lockport’s the land where time stood still.
And that’s its strength.
Nestled in the rolling hills of the Des Plaines River Valley, the town features more than a century’s worth of limestone buildings, Victorian mansions and clapboard cottages, arrayed around the Illinois & Michigan Canal.
According to resident John Lamb, “There are other canal towns, but I have not seen one with more original structures and a canal that’s still intact in the town center.”
Lamb should know. As director of Lewis University’s Canal and Regional History Collection and a retired professor of history at the university, he has spent many years studying the town. Among downtown Lockport’s attractions is a virtually unchanged block of 19th Century buildings, lining State Street from 9th to 10th Streets. “You just don’t see that anymore,” he said. “It’s a great street facade.”
To appreciate the town’s unique architecture, it’s important to understand its history. The arduous job of digging a 60-foot-wide canal that would link the Chicago River at Bridgeport with the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru began in 1836. When the I&M Canal opened in 1848, it created an age of prosperity for Chicago and other communities along the waterway, including Lockport, which served as the canal headquarters.
There, wealthy merchants, canal contractors, grain dealers and carriage manufacturers built prestigious dwellings alongside the humble homes of canal workers.
By the late 19th Century, however, railroads had claimed most of the canal traffic. While the sounds of boatmen’s conversations and of mules’ hooves on nearby towpaths disappeared, many of Lockport’s original buildings survived.
“It’s very fortunate that urban renewal was not high on this city’s list several decades ago,” Lamb said. “That probably prevented many of these historic buildings from being razed.”
The locktenders were pulled from the canal in 1933, and improvements to both the canal and the town around it remained stagnant until the late 1970s, according to Gerald Adelmann of Lockport, president of the Canal Corridor Association. That non-profit group ensures that preservation, conservation and economic development are integrated throughout the region.
“We wanted to focus not just on the canal, but the property, industry, business and local governments along the entire waterway,” he said.
In 1984, these efforts resulted in the creation by Congress of the first National Heritage Corridor, a park that runs 98 miles along the I&M Canal. “Canal towns like Lockport are the heart and soul of the community,” Adelmann said. “These irreplaceable buildings have tremendous potential for new uses, which allows the community to capitalize on its unique history.”
Lockport’s historic district offers no fewer than 37 important sites and structures. Many buildings have undergone thoughtful, time-consuming renovation, including the Gaylord Building at 200 W. 8th St.
“The two-story section, built in 1838, is made of dolomite limestone from a local quarry,” Lamb said. “It’s the same cream-colored limestone that was hauled by barge and used for Chicago’s historic Water Tower and pumping station.”
With funding from the Donnelley family, who are descendants of the founders of the Gaylord Lock Co., the Gaylord Lockport Co. restored the building to its 1860s appearance. It houses the I&M Canal Visitors Center, which provides literature, exhibits and audiovisuals on the building and on the area’s history and geography. Other tenants include the Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery, with ever-changing art exhibits and the Public Landing Restaurant, whose enormous windows were once arched portals where wagons entered with canal goods.
The Will County Historical Society, 803 S. State St., houses the I&M Canal Museum, a collection of pioneer and Native American artifacts. The building, which once served as the canal commissioner’s headquarters, was the first built in Lockport, according to Lamb. “The one-story clapboard structure was built in 1837,” he said. “Besides serving as an engineering office, it’s been a bank, a land office and a telegraph office. When the canal opened, tolls were collected here.”
A two-story addition was built in 1876 to serve as the canal commissioner’s home.
At 201 W. 10th St. is the Norton Building, a massive limestone structure built in 1850 as a grain warehouse and supply store. It’s owned by Tom Alves and Bob Burcenski, partners in the Tallgrass and Public Landing restaurants. “We’re committed to returning the (Norton) building to its original exterior,” Alves said.
That effort began in the late 1980s. The building’s exterior had begun to bulge, requiring extensive shoring and patching. “We had to get stone quarried to replace damaged areas of the building, and that took about six months,” Alves said.
The building’s interior has provided a particular challenge. It had 50,000 square feet of space, with hand-hewn trusses and no floors. Renovation has included the addition of 4 miles of structural steel and 600 tons of concrete for new floors. To install a gravity-fed sewer, trains on the nearby Illinois Central Railroad line were halted on a Saturday night.
“The track bed was removed so construction could take place in just a few hours,” Alves said. The price tag for that task alone was $50,000, and Alves estimated they have spent $2.7 million on the project, with another $1 million to go.
Included in those costs were the services of archeologists and a consultant who performed a six-month study of the building’s previous purposes.
“They performed archeological digs in the canal bed, in the building and on the property,” Alves said. “It was fascinating. We discovered a water turbine from the 1850s buried under the building.”
The turbine had used water from the canal to process grain. “This was cutting-edge technology at that time,” Alves said.
Finally, there were the bees. When a crew from Commonwealth Edison came to install power last year, work stopped almost immediately.
“We don’t work with bees,” they told Alves.
About 50,000 bees had made their home behind one of the exterior walls. “It’s illegal to kill bees or destroy wild hives,” Alves explained, “so we located a beekeeper. Late one evening, we watched as he carefully removed the hive piece by piece. It took him four hours, but he was able to remove and relocate the bees.”
Despite all the work, expense and headaches, Alves said, “We’re very pleased with the outcome. This is a great building.”
Lamb noted that the Norton and Gaylord buildings, both commercial buildings, are two critical anchors downtown. “These buildings are special for their historical and architectural significance, and it’s great to see the investment to renovate them,” he said. The Norton building today houses Lock’s Antique Port, a 6,000-square-foot mall, as well as a women’s clothing store. Alves and Burcenski also live in the building and host a series of concerts in its loft area.
Nearby, State Street from 9th to 10th Streets traces its roots to a local disaster. In 1895, the Great Fire of Lockport destroyed all the buildings on the street’s east side except for an imposing limestone building at the corner. “The fire burned for several days and caused great damage. Even Chicago’s fire department sent help,” Lamb said. Rebuilt after the fire, these structures have fine sheet metal cornices, and some have cast iron storefronts, he added.
Lockport’s small-town ambience drew Tom and Lynn Sperling from Palos Heights to the Myers Building at 911-920 S. State St. “We moved our family and construction business here because we liked the old buildings downtown,” Tom Sperling said.
The vintage building they bought was in bad shape. “It was a jumble of dental offices and apartments. We hooked up chains to my son’s Jeep and pulled the interior walls out,” he said.
During the renovation, Sperling found scorch marks left from the Great Fire. “Only the walls were left standing. Everything else had been rebuilt,” Sperling said. “An architect’s drawing indicated wood paneling below the storefront windows. We found some old doors at a salvage yard, turned them sideways and painted them. They provide the look in the drawing and it’s a good use of old materials.”
The building at 905 S. State St. was built in 1850 by Dr. John Daggett, a physician, quarry operator and editor of Lockport’s first newspaper. Now it serves Canal House Antiques, owned by Ray and Rosemary Winters, who extensively restored the building in 1990.
“The original exterior colors were similar to what you see here today,” said Rosemary of the building’s dark green and dark red paint with gold leaf accents.
Inside, she found 14 layers of wallpaper border at the top of the walls, which, along with the ceilings, were made of lath and plaster bound with horsehair. The interior was illuminated by gas lights.
Built of limestone with a dressing of red brick, the building has an iron storefront. “It was a fun building to work on. An architect did the drawings and it took about seven months to restore,” she said.
On the next block is 1006 S. State St., restored in 1981 by those gluttons for restoration punishment, Alves and Burcenski, as a home for their Tallgrass restaurant. Built in 1895, the building features an unusually large stained glass window and a red stone that Lamb believes originated in another state.
“The interesting thing is the amount of money the builder spent,” he added. “Much more went into this and it’s much fancier than others built here in 1895.”
Alves served as general contractor in the renovation, and he and Burcenski also provided a lot of the labor. “This was another building that needed a complete gut,” Alves said. “The only original features inside are the tin ceiling and the door hardware.”
They stripped and refinished the wood and installed paneling from another Victorian building that had been torn down in Chicago.
After carefully examining the brick and stonework building, Burcenski, exercising his master’s degree in fine arts, selected the exterior colors used on the cornice and around the windows.
“It’s funny when I look back, but at the time it wasn’t,” Alves said. “I don’t like heights, but I assembled three stories of scaffolding. Every day for three weeks, I climbed up there to paint and I just didn’t look down. There were no problems until the day I finished. I had climbed down and was stepping onto the sidewalk when I fell and broke my wrist! The restaurant was to open in a few weeks, and all I could think about was how would I open the wine bottles.”
At 1100 S. State St. is the Adelmann block. This structure, built in 1891, began as a livery stable and its cast-iron ground floor has large windows and a central doorway once used for the carriages. In 1895 the structure was extended to the corner. The second story features a sheet metal oriel, a projecting bay window, topped by a bell-shaped roof.
Sandy and Jim Samoska of Palos Park purchased the Adelmann block in 1988 for their business, Lindahl Marine Contractors, an underwater marine construction firm. The exterior needed major attention.
“It needed foundation work, extensive painting, some new windows and basically a facelift,” Sandy Samoska said.
The detailed paint job on the outside took several months. “We used four different custom colors and were very careful about selecting them,” she explained. “The building, including its limestone slab sidewalks, is on the National Register of Historic Places.”
The Central Square Building at 9th and Hamilton Streets is another example of restoration. Embers from the 1895 inferno blew into the old school’s wooden clock tower, burning the school to the ground. A new school, now the Central Square Building, was built that year in the same place on the town’s square. When it looked like the building would be razed for a parking facility in the 1970s, citizens pushed for restoration.
“I was on the school board at the time there was talk of demolishing the building,” said Lockport Mayor Richard Dystrup. In 1980, this gracious old building was saved and became the center for city and township government.
“It’s a unique experience to have an office here,” said the mayor. “I have many memories since I attended grades 3 through 5 in this building. The touch and feel here have certainly been part of my life, and to come back . . . well, nostalgia is part of it.”
Nostalgia extends to the centerpiece of Lockport’s history, the canal, which is the focus of a massive hydrology study being conducted by the city. “This would permit us to once again use the I&M Canal for recreational purposes,” Dystrup said.
Just in time for 1998, the 150th anniversary of the canal. But that’s another chapter in Lockport’s history book.
