The Old Courthouse Is Coming Down, Saints Preserve Us!
By Nick Reiher
Editor
Unless there is a last-minute stay of execution, the former Will County Courthouse in Downtown Joliet could begin coming down sometime later this year.
Were it not for delays in projects due to COVID (How many times have we said that?) the 54-year-old building likely would not have made it past 51.
The Will County Board in October 2019, after hearing from Wight and Associates that the building would need some $40 million to bring it up to speed for continued use, voted to have the building demolished and the site set aside for future government use.
Someone at that time made a quick reference that maybe the site could be used for parking until the county was ready for a new building. The comment was brushed off, but would end up having the same effect as Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxx drivel, albeit on a more local scale.
The grassroots group that would until very recently try to save the building, which they described as a fine example of Brutalist architecture (No foolin’), would take up a mantra of, “They want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot!”
Apologies to Joni Mitchell. Yet, numbers of the courthouse preservation group grew, and others wondered why. But let’s take a look:
Brutalist architecture – using a lot of concrete, steel and glass – was popular in the 1960s and ‘70s. You had Marina Towers, the UIC campus and, something that occurred to me only recently, the former Herald News building on Caterpillar Drive, now the administrative home of the Joliet Township High Schools District.
I was in awe of the latter building when I came down from the Northwest Side of Chicago to interview at the HN in March 1985. I had worked in newspaper offices in a strip mall next to a pizza-by-the-slice joint (not a bad thing) and in offices above a lumber yard sales center.
Not only was this a free-standing building with no lumber (or pizza) in sight, but it had a moat! Or at least an adjacent pond we named “Lake Copley,” after the previous owners of the paper, and the rowboat used to clean it was the “S.S. Copley.”
There were a lot of large glass windows, which we used to run to when the weather got bad. And it had a “café commons” break area with fancy tile and plants surrounding it. … after they took out the water rimming the room since someone tripped and fell in it.
Good times.
As for the courthouse, my brother Gordon and friend Earl, both in their 70s, commented that the old courthouse should be saved. It was built in their era. Maybe that’s why they felt a connection.
I know this: I can’t think of one person who worked in the old courthouse on a regular basis who wanted to save it. I had been in there quite a few times, for jury duty and that’s where sheriff’s offices were before they built the new Safety Center on Laraway.
But the preservationists were vocal and persistent, willing even to figure out a way to change state trust laws so the old courthouse could be developed for commercial use. They got the ears of some County Board members, old and new, who were interested enough to want to hear development possibilities, even though they were told over and over and over again, it would be nearly impossible.
Which the preservationists took as, “So, that’s a maybe?” Like a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
As much as I came to groan whenever I saw the old courthouse issue on a county committee agenda, I give the preservationists a lot of credit. They had a cause they believed in, and they beat that dead horse into a dented can of dog food, crushed by a passing semi.
Whatever ultimately goes up in its place, someone will not be happy. When the new courthouse went up, some said it was too flashy for a steel and stone town.
When JTHS Central built its addition out of limestone similar to that used in the original 1901 building, some said it just made it look more like a prison. (I think it’s a beautiful building).
I have no fear county officials will find something else to keep them busy. The last meeting was six hours, and only a brief mention of the old courthouse.
Progress.
P.S. I would love to claim the punny headline on the IDOT story on watching out for mating deer – “Deer Prudence” – but I cannot. It came with the release, and was a much-appreciated smile coming from an agency that can be short on them.