Mayor Chet Rybicki gathered the town’s top volunteers and business leaders in his office and asked them what they had planned for the city’s 150th birthday. He knew they wanted to create something permanent as a present for future generations of Napervillians, but he was thinking along the lines of a few dozen trees, a statue, maybe a new community center.
Then the vision emerged: A downtown pedestrian walkway–a pretty landscaped path that would wind along the DuPage River and draw residents into the heart of the city. It would be built by Naperville and for Naperville, with no help or interference from the state or the federal government, and it would be open within the year to mark the sesquicentennial celebration.
Rybicki looked out of his window that day in 1980 and tried to imagine it.
Back then, no one walked along Naperville’s riverfront. It was an ugly place, home to salt piles, oil tanks, a maintenance garage and metered parking lot. But he thought, “Geez, wouldn’t that be nice.”
Just like that, Naperville’s Sesquicentennial Riverwalk was born. Donations flowed in, from school children and millionaires. Volunteers stepped forward. They moved earth, planted trees, laid bricks — and along the way, they changed the course of Naperville’s future.
“Without the river walk, I could envision Naperville’s downtown slowly dying, and this would have spread like a cancer,” said Rybicki, a resident since 1960 who was mayor from 1975 until 1983.
Dorcas Pearcy, the owner of Toenniges Jewelry on West Jefferson since 1948, agrees. She said the downtown would have been “deadsville” without the river walk and thrives because of it. “It’s a very healthy situation that few suburbs have,” she said.
Such a thought is unimaginable for most Naperville residents, because most of them weren’t living here when the river walk was built. The town has grown rapidly in those 15 years, to more than 109,000 today from about 42,000 in 1981.
Most take the river walk for granted, just another lovely amenity in a suburb lauded for its safe neighborhoods, quality schools, strong employment base, thriving downtown and rich history. But the long-timers know what the river walk means to Naperville.
It convinced city leaders to build the new Nichols Library and the new Municipal Building along the river. It brought new stores and restaurants downtown. It sparked festivals and concerts. Mostly, it created a powerful magnet that drew people out of their far-flung subdivisions and into the center city.
“Everything about Naperville is about the river walk,” said Rick Hitchcock, a lifelong resident and a landscape architect who helped design the river walk’s original stretch and its expansion over the last decade. “It isn’t the physical qualities. The people have their emotions invested here.”
The river walk’s picture graces either the cover or the centerfold of nearly every publication about Naperville. Real estate agents take their clients there before they show their first home. Corporate recruiters use it to sell the community to prospective transfers. If someone visits from out of town, they get taken to the river walk. Downtown shops and restaurants use “river” in their name to draw attention to this once-ignored asset.
And 16 years after its birth, residents still flock there in droves, day and night, throughout the sweltering summer and icy winter.
Families push their strollers, stopping to feed the ducks or to talk to a neighbor. Rotary Hill, sandwiched between Centennial Beach and Aurora Avenue, becomes an outdoor concert theater in the summer, a sled hill in the winter. There’s fishing in the quarry and swimming at the beach. There’s a playground and a baseball diamond, paddle boats and picnic groves. There’s three bridges, two shelters, and one sculpture called “Landforms.”
The challenge that spawned the river walk actually has its roots in the city’s centennial celebration in 1931. The town residents, about 5,000 at the time, wanted to build a permanent memorial to honor the city’s 100th birthday. So they raised money and transformed an abandoned quarry into a community swimming park they called Centennial Beach. Hundreds worked together to build the bath house, which still stands today.
At the opening ceremony, the mayor talked about how nice it would be to have a path that connected the downtown to the beach.
It took another 50 years.
In 1980, business leaders, including lumber store owner Jim Moser and caterer Al Rubin, convinced architect Chuck George to take a trip to see the river walk in San Antonio, Texas. It was nothing like the one they envisioned for Naperville — more commercial than recreational — but it showed these leaders what could happen to a town when a drainage ditch is transformed into a community attraction.
After the first stretch was completed, the Riverwalk Commission decided to build on the water theme. They tore away the fence that surrounded a second abandoned quarry, stocked it with fish, and launched a paddle-boat concession. They linked the path to Centennial Beach.
The river walk now stretches three miles along both sides of the river, but the commission still is looking to expand in both directions. Eventually, the commission hopes to connect the path to North Central College and the Historic District. One idea is to create a performing arts amphitheater with a stage on one of quarries.
The same community spirit that mobilized for river walk also helped create Safety Town, a $1.2 million miniature village at Aurora Avenue and River Road, a place where 5- and 6-year-olds will be trained to survive the dangers of everyday life.
It’s also working to launch Century Walk, a project to bring 30 large-scale public art projects to downtown Naperville in the next 10 years.
The way the river walk was built has come to represent something larger about this community and its people, something about its scrappy self-reliance and its ability to mobilize before things veer too far off course.
Naperville is a Chicago suburb, but it’s also the oldest town in DuPage County and one that owes its legacy to the river. Its rapid growth over the last two decades seems to embody the stigma of suburban sprawl, but remarkably, its core is as healthy as its edges.
It’s a place filled with corporate transients, people who come and go on the average of every four years. Still, there never seems to be a problem scaring up legions of volunteers for every imaginable project, and the natives aren’t inclined to groan about growth or pine for those days when Naperville was a sleepy farming town of 20,000 people.
“It would take a team of horses to transfer me out of Naperville,” said Denise Whitty, an executive who moved there three years ago from the Detroit area after her company transferred her sales responsibilities to the region. “I’m never leaving here.”
For Whitty, it was the first impression that clinched her loyalty. She and her husband spent a frustrating week looking at North Shore communities, but she said the reception was lukewarm, at best.
Then she came to Naperville. She stopped at the city manager’s office, where a secretary volunteered to mail the classified advertisements to their Michigan home so her husband could scan the job ads. Shortly after they moved there, their son got sick while they were both out of town. They didn’t have any friends or family in town, so their real estate agent volunteered to pick him up.
As an executive vice president for Getting To Know You, Whitty knows what it takes to make a newcomer feel welcome. But she was still flabbergasted by the spontaneous gestures of kindness — especially in such a relatively large community.
“To me, Naperville is utopia,” said Whitty, 44, and a mother of four. “The community really works together. Everyone is very optimistic about the future here, and Naperville has done a good job of promoting that.”
Naperville has its flaws. People complain about the traffic and the shortage of downtown parking. It’s not a diverse town, either racially or economically, although that’s slowly changing.
And it’s a pricey place to live, with the median house costing almost $210,000 and the median annual property-tax bill hovering around $4,500.
“People like to complain about the little things because there’s nothing really big to complain about,” Rybicki said. “A famous judge here, Win Knoch, used to call this place `The Hometown of the Universe.’ When you were here, you were here. The new people do inherit that feeling. They’re not in a hurry to get out of here.”
LEARN MORE ON THE WEB
For more information about Naperville, ranging from breaking news to entertainment options, check out the Chicago Tribune’s Digital Cities website for Naperville:
http://chicago.digitalcity.com/naperville
The Chicago Tribune has similar sites for six other Chicago-area communities: Crystal Lake, Orland Park, Evanston, Arlington Heights, Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. Just substitute the name of the town for Naperville in the web address above.
