The Gaylord Building in Lockport, a historic site along the Illinois & Michigan Canal, will be able to revitalize its exhibits with a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The grant will be used to reimagine the building’s first-floor main exhibit, which covers the impact of the I&M Canal on northeastern Illinois.
“It’s very stationary, so it’s not something you can easily change out. There’s large blocks of limestone in it,” said executive director Pam Owens. “It tells the story of the I&M Canal, and it’s great. It was an award-winning exhibit in 1999. It just needs a refresh.”
Another issue, she said, is the exhibit is now crowded enough that it can’t easily accommodate large groups, such as school groups.
“It’s difficult to even, say, have an entire classroom gather together in that space,” Owens said.
The goal is to use the grant to redesign the space, making use of digital kiosks to create more adaptable experiences that staff can easily update, replacing the fixed text panels.
“It will also allow us to build on those other stories that are part of the canal,” Owens said. “It might be that you would be like, OK, this time going through the exhibit I want to learn more about the Native American story. And so you can follow all of the panels, and it’s like having multilayered exhibits, where you can get just the story of the I&M Canal, or it could be a special exhibit where we’re going to talk about local breweries, or it could be about the Great Migration post-Civil War.”
The Gaylord Building is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit established by Congress that works to preserve historic buildings across the country.
The building dates from 1838, when it was constructed as a warehouse meant to hold building materials for the then-under-construction I&M Canal. When active, the canal ran 96 miles, connecting the Chicago River at Bridgeport to the Illinois River at LaSalle and Peru.
While the canal was later made defunct by improved shipping connections and parts of it have since been filled in, at the time it played an important role in Chicago’s development as a transportation hub.
“Back then, I mean, Illinois was the frontier,” Owens said.
After the canal was completed 10 years later, the building became a grain warehouse. Over the years, it was expanded multiple times and found multiple new lives, including as a brass foundry and a specialty print shop.
In the 1980s, the building was purchased by Gaylord Donnelly, whose grandfather had once owned the building and who began the process of renovating it and working to preserve it. His widow later donated the building to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Owens said work on more concrete plans for how the building can use the grant will begin starting in January.
“Ideally, we will have all of this done within a year,” Owens said.
There are other renovations she hopes to see the building undergo, including the creation of a fully immersive digital space.
“Eventually, we would like to take the rear part of this gallery and create an immersive experience, where everything is digital,” Owens said. “You could really go in and feel like you’re right there.”
elewis@chicagotribune.com
