Felix Smith had driven down Torrence Avenue for years going back to the 1970s, at first for the $15 extra large pizza at Popolano’s.
“There would be so much pizza, you’re not going to eat it all,” he said.
On one of his trips to Lansing about nine years ago, he spotted a house for sale along 176th Street and jumped at the opportunity to move from Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood to an area he long considered “quiet and peaceful.”
He was untroubled by the looming Pioneer Motel across the street from his front yard. In fact, it was a good thing.
“I tell people I live right by the windmill,” Smith said. “You can always see it.”
That’s no longer the case, as the notable roadside structure came down earlier this month when the rest of the Pioneer Motel was torn down. Village officials in Lansing purchased the property last year and soon after initiated the demolition, according to Village Manager Dan Podgorski.
The motel had long been a south suburban sore spot, a no-tell motel with stays available in four-hour increments that often ended badly.
“That place was notorious,” said Marlene Cook, a longtime Lansing resident who writes regularly about the village’s history for the local Lansing Journal newspaper. “It was a crime-loaded place. It was a flophouse. Police were there all the time.”
Among those responders was Jerry Zeldenrust, a longtime police officer who’s now a village trustee.
“In my early days on patrol, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was well known that any call from over there was most likely going to be a nefarious situation, where someone got ripped off, or a guy wakes up with no clothes, no wallet and no keys. To say nothing all the drug traffic and all that other stuff,” Zeldenrust said.
“I’m 67, and basically everyone who grew up in this town, like I did, only knew the Pioneer to be a seedy place that you don’t go to.”
It wasn’t always that way. In 1950, officials cut the ribbon on the first section of “the first modern expressway in Chicagoland,” on the Torrence Avenue overpass over the freshly laid concrete roadway then known as the Calumet Parkway, a section of the planned Tri-State Expressway, according to a 1950 Chicago Tribune article.
“These expressways differ from all other wide pavements in Chicagoland in that there is no cross traffic, … opposing streams of traffic are physically separated from each other, and … of course, there are no pedestrians and no parking,” the Tribune writer marveled.
This modern mode of transportation would usher in a golden age of motoring, and John Oosterhuis, an immigrant from the Netherlands, planned to take advantage by building the Dutch Mill Motel in 1951 adjacent to the new highway.
To help draw motorists off the wide roadway, now called the Kingery Expressway, he erected a large windmill on the inn’s front lawn. It worked, so Oosterhuis had an even larger windmill built above the motel’s new office building, complete with motorized fan blades that would spin like those of a real Dutch windmill on a breezy day.
“There was a playground for kids, and it was a family destination as well as a place for weary travelers,” Zeldenrust said. “People would go down I-80 and say, ‘hey, there’s a giant windmill!’ It was their calling card.”
Though not part of a chain, Lansing’s Dutch Mill was one of several windmill-themed motels scattered across North America, some dating back to the 1930s and others built in the 1970s and after. Many were also called Dutch Mill, according to information compiled by the website roadsidearchitecture.com. There were Dutch Mills in Wisconsin Dells, Mayfield, Kentucky and Dixon, Illinois, along with a bunch in Florida and California.
Oosterhuis did well enough to purchase some acreage in Iowa, where he moved in 1971 after selling his motel. The Dutch Mill became the Pioneer Motel.
“In the 1970s, teens discovered it and held weekend parties,” Cook said. “Then the adult parties took over.”
Somewhere along the way, the windmill stopped spinning, becoming instead a billboard of sorts, eventually advertising jacuzzi suites.
Smith, the neighbor across the street, lived in the shadow of that windmill for the Pioneer’s last nine years, when many of the motel rooms had become residential rentals. Even as many people focused on its negative aspects, there were good things about the place even at the end.
“People know Lansing by the Pioneer. You know, the windmill there,” he said. “I never knew it to be a place where there was a lot of ruckus, but the people did party. And they had a ball. They pull out their drinks and they sit out in the back and enjoy it. I’ve seen them barbecue. They were living. There wasn’t a lot of violence. People were enjoying each other and getting along.”
After acquiring the property, Lansing worked quickly to tear the old motel down, the giant, kitschy roadside windmill with it.
But Zeldenrust, the village trustee and former cop who’d responded to many calls on that property, didn’t want to give up on this Lansing landmark without at least looking into saving it.
That won’t be easy. For one thing, the windmill’s bottom third was built into the office structure.
“We were in a quandary,” he said. “It was hard to find people that were excited enough to salvage it — to pay for the crane that would have been required to do it right.”
The answer was to strap the windmill together as securely as possible and ask the demolition team to “lay it down slowly.”
“It was going to be a gamble,” Zeldenrust said. “They didn’t promise anything.”
As the windmill structure was being lowered to the ground, “the fan blades came down first,” he said, and the windmill’s cap was destroyed. But the main body of it came down intact.
“Now we’re trying to figure out how to do a proper salvage job on it,” he said.
A larger issue is coming up with a place to put the windmill. Ideally, Zeldenrust said, it would be restored on the property where it has welcomed visitors to Lansing for 70 years. But that’s unlikely.
Podgorski, the village administrator, said officials plan some additional land assembly in the area, and then it will be redeveloped with retail stores.
Zeldenrust said the hope is for upscale restaurants and stores, which may not mesh with “a gigantic old windmill.”
He’s been in conversation with other village officials to see if there’s a spot on public property to house the windmill, but said he didn’t hear a lot of support.
“We reached out to South Holland to see if they were interested, since they’re a Dutch community,” Zeldenrust said, and a team from that village came out to investigate “if they could move it or use it, or find a place to put it.”
That effort didn’t gain any traction, and they said they’re going to pass, he said.
“I’m doing this on the wing. I don’t have authority to give it to anybody. I’m just a trustee looking at this Dutch thing. How often does a Dutchman get to salvage a windmill?” Zeldenrust said.
But there are no easy answers, even at home.
“My wife said it’s not going to fit in our front yard,” he said.
A few days later, as he and some workers went back to the former motel property for a closer inspection of the remnants of the windmill, the outlook dimmed even further.
“The damage from taking it down was a bit more than we thought,” he said. “There will be significant costs to build a base, repair and install the (intact) sections and fix it up cosmetically.”
But the effort already has been worthwhile, he said. For one thing, it’s a chance to recover the story of the family-friendly Dutch Mill Motel from the sticky, unfortunate wreckage of its Pioneer Motel legacy.
“Part of my motivation is to tell the story of this thing, and what it was about when it was put in,” Zeldenrust said. “It’s a Dutch thing, and a local history thing, and it would pay homage to a bygone generation. And it’s a good story.”
It’s also something that’s unique, a remnant roadside attraction in the suburban landscape.
“Fads come and go, but there’s a sustained interest in this kind of thing,” Zeldenrust said. “To think we have one sitting right here, if we can salvage it somehow.
“The future is undetermined, but I’m hopeful.”
Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
