After years in an economic deep freeze, the brawny, blue-collar towns that encircle Chicago–Aurora, Elgin, Joliet and Waukegan–are hot again.
Aggressive and sometimes involuntary annexations have sparked turnarounds, to the point that Aurora and Joliet trailed only Naperville last year in suburban new-home construction in the six-county metropolitan area. By 2020, all four towns are projected to be among Chicago’s top five suburbs in population, along with Naperville.
Rivers of cash from floating casinos in Aurora, Elgin and Joliet have repaved streets, built storm sewers and renovated Victorian homes. Waukegan, excluded from the casino club by state law, has looked on enviously.
Many of the newcomers are young families looking for starter homes, pushing up median incomes. Once-moribund downtowns are beginning to show signs of life, from espresso bars to loft apartments.
But for all their success, the cities remain deeply divided. Huge gaps in school performance, tax revenue and racial makeup split one side of town from another.
Builders don’t advertise that their developments lie within the cities’ limits–evidence of lingering image problems. And while their peripheries are studded with riches, from the Stonebridge golf course subdivision in Aurora to Waukegan’s gated River Bend community, their downtowns remain largely poor and underused.
There also are signs that Aurora, Elgin and Joliet, rebounding from decades of heavy reliance on manufacturing, have become one-industry towns of a different sort–built around casinos.
In Joliet, gambling accounts for 3,700 employees, or about 11 percent of the city’s workforce. In Aurora, Hollywood Casino is the city’s second-largest employer with 1,600 workers. Elgin’s Grand Victoria Casino is the city’s third-largest employer and its biggest taxpayer.
That’s fine as long as it lasts. But the high rolling could end if more casinos saturate the Chicago market or if a bad political roll of the dice closed the riverboats, experts say.
“It looks a lot like the steel industry did 50 years ago,” said Bill Eadington, an economics professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada-Reno. “It’s the dominant employer.”
Fifty years ago, these cities had more than steel. As old as Chicago and with their own manufacturing muscle, they had headstrong, vibrant identities. Urban planners dubbed them satellite cities, distinct from newer, more traditional suburbs that sprung up around Chicago.
When radio stations needed the exact time, they got it from Elgin, where an Elgin National Watch Co. observatory fixed on stars nightly to calibrate the company’s master clocks. The watch factory closed in 1966.
Harry Caray landed his first radio gig at WCLS in Joliet, “shaking like a leaf,” he once recalled. Jack Benny and Ray Bradbury grew up in Waukegan.
In Aurora, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson and other seminal blues artists recorded tracks in the 1930s that influenced Chicago blues icons Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Joliet’s six wallpaper mills, now shuttered, once produced one-third of the nation’s wallpaper. The Burlington Route, one of the railways that conquered the West, was born in Aurora.
Waukegan’s Lake Michigan port was jammed with factories making steel, chemicals, sausage, envelopes, asbestos and outboard motors.
But as in the other satellite cities, most of those factories are silent. Several have left toxic legacies. In Waukegan, cancer-causing PCBs remaining from previous harbor cleanups may be dredged and dumped atop a nearby asbestos pile. Local officials would consider that progress: two Superfund sites combined into one.
In all of the cities, the downward spin of industry yielded a downtrodden image that persists.
“The perception around northeast Illinois is that Joliet is the armpit of the state,” said Joliet City Councilman Tim Brophy.
Waukegan Downtown Association Chairman Jack Potter said this of how people see his downtown and, to a degree, the whole city: “Scary characters on the streets. A lot of vacant buildings. Not real safe.”
The images have stuck despite assorted programs and initiatives.
In Elgin, a committee proposed advertisements last year comparing the town to television’s “Mayberry RFD.” Dismissing that idea, one former City Council member groused, “The day after this runs, we’ll have a gang shooting.”
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Aurora officials hound businesses and subdivisions when they fail to identify themselves as a part of the city, even if, by a quirk of the U.S. Postal Service, they have Naperville mailing addresses.
Waukegan deployed its “Sunrise Ambassadors” last fall: welfare recipients in vests who roam downtown with brooms and dustpans.
In Joliet, a tourist bureau touts not only gambling but an abandoned steel mill that recently debuted as a 45-acre, $1.3 million urban archeological park.
But shuttered steel mills, even if made into tourist attractions, won’t pay the municipal bills. Commercial developments and new rooftops will, and city officials know it.
Aurora is the largest of the four with 122,000 people. The smallest, Waukegan, is the area’s sixth-largest city with 77,000 people.
“They’ve all just gone on an annexation binge,” said Marc Thomas, an associate planner at the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
The hottest real estate in all four cities has one defining characteristic: School districts that do not include the words “Aurora,” “Elgin,” “Joliet” or “Waukegan.” Builders advertise that their developments are not part of city school districts that happen to be poor, struggling academically and racially mixed.
One development calls itself “Brookside of Plainfield,” even though it’s in Joliet. With homes starting at $230,000, the development feeds into Plainfield schools, where test scores exceed those of Joliet schools.
On the woodsy, western edge of Waukegan, Regency Woods homes start around $270,000. Advertisements tout “Libertyville schools.” The subdivision’s young children go to Oak Grove Elementary District 68, where cumulative 6th-grade student scores on Illinois standard tests rank in the top quarter of Chicago-area schools. Waukegan elementary schools rank in the bottom 5 percent.
Each student in the Oak Grove district is backed by $354,000 in assessed real estate value–five times as much as in Waukegan, state figures show. Oak Grove elementary children proceed to Libertyville High School, ranked fourth out of 86 Chicago-area high school districts for ACT scores. Waukegan ranks 77th.
“That is one of their strong selling points–the Libertyville schools,” said resident Shelley Beauchamp, 31, standing in the doorway of a Regency Hill home, a gleaming sport-utility vehicle in the garage.
Joliet City Manager John Mezera sees the phenomenon not as an insult to his city but rather the work of market forces imposed by a mobile middle class. Builders, he said, “know that they’ll get the highest sales from touting the hottest school districts.”
Near the centers of town, by contrast, poorly performing schools have been a drag on development. A 1997 study concluded that Joliet’s central public schools “will serve as a deterrent to an ownership commitment by couples with children, and even (those) without (children) who are concerned about their ability to resell.”
Indeed, at the inner-city Joliet Elementary District 86, school roofs frequently leak, more than half the students come from low-income families and teachers are among the lowest-paid in the state.
Aurora’s wealthiest subdivisions bordering Naperville are served by Indian Prairie District 204, which in 1997 opened the $62.5 million Neuqua Valley High School, the state’s most expensive school.
Next door at Aurora East District 131, an elementary district in the poorest part of town, students from different grades occupy the same classrooms to scrimp on teaching staff. Low property values mean federal and state aid makes up 60 percent of the budget. Test scores rank in the bottom 10 percent of Chicago-area elementary schools.
In Joliet and Elgin, some parents are working to detach from city schools. A lawsuit filed in December by Joliet Township School District 204 described one effort as “a group of white individuals from a white neighborhood” attempting to “flee from a school system with a predominantly minority student population.”
Parents deny charges of racism, but race is an inescapable tension in Chicago’s satellite cities. In Joliet, black leaders still remember 1968, when city fathers raised the town’s drawbridges to prevent rioters from crossing the Des Plaines River to white neighborhoods after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, economic disparities continue to divide.
“On the West Side in a 3-mile radius there are two Kmarts, a Sam’s (Club), a Wal-Mart, two Cub Foods, a Dominick’s and an Eagle,” said Rev. Clint Wilburn, pastor of the predominantly black Mt. Moriah Baptist Church in Joliet. “There still is no large supermarket on the East Side.”
In Waukegan, Mayor William Durkin, 71, confesses to uneasiness as Hispanics have approached making up half of the city’s population.
“Right now, there is a culture shock,” he said.
“They like loud music. They have a couple cars in the driveway. They change the oil by themselves–and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s getting used to their ways, and them getting used to our ways.”
In 1996, the U.S. Justice Department sued Waukegan, alleging that Hispanic residents had been unfairly targeted by an ordinance allowing no more than a couple, their children and two relatives to live in any household. The lawsuit charged that city officials “declared that they intended to prevent Hispanics from `taking over Waukegan.’ ” The city settled, rescinding the ordinance and allotting $200,000 for damage claims.
Besides uneven schools and racial tension, the perception of crime keeps people away. The perception is not entirely baseless. In 1997, the four cities accounted for almost 75 percent of the murders in DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will Counties.
Waukegan officials like to say their crime rate is lower than that of Gurnee, next door. But most of the disparity is due to thefts at Gurnee Mills mall. Waukegan has a violent crime rate five times higher than Gurnee, Illinois State Police figures show. Aurora has 11 times the violent crime rate of Naperville next door.
City leaders say their towns are cities, not suburbs, and they compare favorably to other mid-size urban centers like Rockford. Like most of the country, their crime rates are falling.
But perceptions die hard. At Madison Avenue restaurant in downtown Waukegan, a white-tablecloth place set on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, a Gurnee man not long ago made a reservation. Then he called back to cancel. Co-owner Marilynn Eccles asked why.
“He said it’s because his wife is scared to come to downtown Waukegan,” she said, shaking her head in bewilderment.
All four towns, critics say, have contributed to their own decline by ignoring crime problems, failing to enforce building codes and allowing high-density development.
In Waukegan, lawyer, pastor and activist Newton Finn founded the Taskforce on Waukegan Neighborhoods (TOWN), an organization that encourages neighbors to sue the owners of nuisance properties to force improvements or demolitions.
In four years, Finn has won nearly 80 cases, often by default when owners fail to appear. He also has become persona non grata at City Hall after a failed bid for mayor.
A current TOWN target, an abandoned house in a Mexican-American neighborhood at 914 S. Adams St., has a gang symbol spray-painted on plywood nailed over the back door.
Finn surveyed the house with a sour look.
“The city has the power to knock a building like this down,” he said.
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“How in living hell can you let this house sit here with children living and playing all around?”
Recently, a potential buyer surfaced and learned of TOWN’s lawsuit in a title search. Now the buyer must agree to demolish the home and pay the TOWN’s legal fees, probably around $1,000, before closing the deal.
“I bet the place is down before the spring,” Finn said.
Elsewhere come signs of hope as entrepreneurs discover the satellite cities’ strengths: architecture, history, waterfronts–and bargain prices.
Real Sports, a new video game company, came to downtown Elgin last May, drawn by a funky, century-old former department store with sturdy plank floors, thick brick walls and massive ceiling beams.
In Aurora, restaurateur Rudy Clai plans to sink $500,000 to reopen the Sky Club, the domed room atop the 22-story tower where “Sonny Boy” once jammed. Appropriately, it will be a blues club. Harrah’s Joliet Casino announced plans last summer to build a 204-room hotel, the first full-service hotel to operate downtown since the 1970s.
Waukegan’s downtown, lacking the salve of casino money, remains a picture of urban decline. But the city recently approved a $33 million improvement plan, paid for by a special tax district. Ideas include restoring the 1,800-seat Genesee Theater, burying a downtown expressway that blocks lakefront access and luring lakefront housing.
Six years ago, Doug Cherry moved his company, On the Spot Printing, from Lincoln Park to downtown Waukegan to escape skyrocketing rents and congestion. These days, he has a 5-minute commute from his 70-year-old restored home.
“I see in this town the opportunity of what I consider to be the ground floor,” he said.
“I think the hard times are done.”