As a student at Joliet Catholic High School in the 1960s, Rev. John Comerford remembers rushing back from football games to light the school’s victory tower. It was the school’s way of sharing wins with the city, which had sent many sons to the all-boys school.
The school, vacant since 1993, will continue to be an integral part of Joliet when it opens later this year as a senior housing complex called Victory Senior Centre.
The three-story building on a hill that has overlooked Joliet for 70 years will house 56 rental apartments for moderate- to low-income senior citizens through the combined efforts of Associated Ventures, a Chicago-based real estate company; the Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., a non-profit housing corporation based in Chicago and chartered by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities to develop, own and operate low- and moderate-income housing; and Will County and state agencies.
Seniors who can live independently will occupy apartments carved from renovated classrooms. There will be 54 one-bedroom apartments ranging in size from 500 to 600 square feet and from $460 to $485 a month in rent, as well as two 700-square-foot, two-bedroom apartments, renting for $525 a month.
“Because of the design features of taking an institutional building and turning it into rental apartments, we end up with larger units,” said James Keledjian, president of Associated Ventures.
Each one- and two-bedroom unfurnished apartment will include a living room, kitchenette and bathroom. A medical exam room, which can be converted into a beauty parlor and barber shop, will be on the first floor; a library and lounge area on the second floor will overlook a large, landscaped courtyard.
“It’s secure, and it’s not accessible from the street,” Keledjian said of the courtyard. “It will be very visual. We consider it the prime amenity.”
The old priory section, once a dormitory for the brothers who taught at the school, is being converted into 30 apartments for seniors who need more intensive daily care, but whose health is not poor enough to require nursing home care. Nancy L. Arnold of Alternacare, the Chicago-based company that will manage the assisted living section of the facility, said that serving residents nutritious meals and administering their medication will help seniors stay healthier and live on their own longer.
“The people we can accommodate are frail and living alone but are not sick enough to go into a nursing facility,” said Arnold, vice president of business development for Alternacare. “They’re probably not eating properly, and they only have relatives or friends checking on them periodically. We will give them the care they need.”
This assisted living section, which is to open in the spring will have a registered nurse and certified nursing assistants to monitor residents’ care. Meals will be prepared by a licensed dietitian, Arnold said, and housekeeping and laundry services will be available.
In addition to saving a landmark, Victory Senior Centre is one of the first publicly funded assisted living facilities in the state, which will also allow the Illinois Department of Public Aid to reduce the state’s costs.
The state agency provides funding for 60 percent of residents in nursing homes and spends $1.3 billion per year to provide long-term care for 56,000 elderly and disabled people who live in 750 nursing facilities statewide, according to Linda Renee Baker, assistant director of the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Assisted living facilities costs are about 25 percent lower than nursing home costs.
“The purpose of supportive living facilities is to give appropriate care in an appropriate setting at a lower cost to the state,” Baker said, adding that assisted living facilities should not be seen as replacements for in-home options. “We don’t want healthy seniors to leave their homes to move into a supportive living facility.”
Jerry Finis, a principal of Associated Ventures, said Victory Centre will allow senior citizens with modest incomes to have high-quality living amenities at a much lower cost.
“Seniors who can’t afford to pay high prices and have to rely on Medicaid are forced to go to a nursing home before they should have to,” Finis said. “If you’re sickly and need around-the-clock medical attention, a nursing home may be needed. But if you can’t cook for yourself, that’s not being sick, that’s just getting older.”
Mary Pat Frye, the director of case coordination for Senior Services Center of Will County, says that 10 calls a month have been coming in as the high school undergoes renovation.
“It would be nice to see that (low-income seniors) receive more supervision even when they cannot pay,” Frye said.
Joliet Catholic High School’s conversion to a senior residential facility is just one of the many changes the building at 31 N. Broadway Ave. has undergone since 1928, when it opened as DeLaSalle High School. In 1933, the Society of Mt. Carmel took over the school from the Christian Brothers and renamed it Joliet Catholic High School. In 1934 and 1954, additions were built on the limestone building, which was vacated in 1990 when the all-boys Joliet Catholic High School merged with the all-girls St. Francis Academy to form Joliet Catholic Academy at another location.
When Plainfield High School was destroyed by a tornado in 1990, the vacant school got a reprieve until 1993, providing a temporary haven for Plainfield’s displaced students. The teaching brothers continued to live in the priory section of the school until October 1996.
Tom McGrath, a Joliet businessman and president of the Joliet Catholic Alumni Association, said the vacant school remains a vital part of the community because it provided a quality education to many of its residents and their relatives.
“The teachers were good. They were tough but compassionate,” McGrath said. “They were motivating and cared about the students. It was a great place to go to school.”
He said the school’s more than 20,000 graduates can be found in such faraway places as Bangladesh, Hong Kong and South Africa, but many are still in the Joliet area. The city’s last three mayors, the late John Bourg, Charlie Connor and Art Schultz, graduated from the school. McGrath said the alumni association’s events are always well attended, and it doesn’t hurt business to be a graduate.
“There’s a community of graduates who support the area,” he said.
Although most of the building’s interior has been removed, a mosaic tile mural of the history of the Carmelites will remain in the stairway. “It’s a beautiful piece of art, and we could work around it,” said Bill Green of Nadel Architects, which designed the renovation.
Green said converting the school into a senior housing complex was “moderately challenging” because the classrooms’ existing windows left large, open spaces. (Multiple smaller windows have been installed in those spaces.) Because the school had grown in phases over a period of decades, there was a lack of consistency in the drawings, forcing builders to investigate scrupulously the structural safety of each of its sections, Nadel said.
Despite the challenges, the senior facility already has a fan in Park Forest President Patrick Kelly. Kelly, who graduated from the school in 1957 — as did his father, Francis, in 1933 — said a recent tour of the facility brought back memories of daydreaming in class.
“I walked into an apartment that used to be my English class and looked out of the window at the Greek church on Hickory (Street),” Kelly said. “I remembered that view. I had seen it hundreds of times.”
Associated Ventures will build a similar complex in Park Forest in the spring.
“It really was an impressive project,” Kelly said of Joliet’s facility. “They took a derelict building and made it into something useful.”
The school’s most symbolic feature, its victory tower, will remain a fixture in the community. Comerford, who graduated from the school in 1966 and later taught there, said the tower was lit on special occasions.
“We would rush back to school and Brother Joe Martin would let us throw it on,” said Comerford, adding that the light was visible for miles around.
In 1986, the tower marked another victory, the return of Rev. Lawrence Jenco, who had been held hostage in Lebanon for almost 19 months. For eight nights, from his release until the time he returned home, the tower was lit. Jenco, who died two years ago, recuperated at the priory for a month, according to Comerford.
“He needed peace and quiet,” he said.
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From 3 to 7 p.m. Oct. 30, there will be an open house at Victory Senior Centre, 31 N. Broadway Ave., Joliet. For information, call 815-727-2380.
