Joliet parks director outlines flexibility of future East Side rec center

JOLIET – The future East Side Recreation Center has been slow in starting, and it might not even be done when it’s finished – but that’s by design.

At a community meeting last month, Joliet Park District Executive Director Tom Carstens described a facility that can be converted to different uses and expanded after it opens.

“This building is really flexible and can convert into a lot of things,” Carstens told what appeared to be a satisfied audience during the meeting April 27.

The official grand opening has been scheduled for November 2018, but Carstens said the facility is more likely to open by August 2018.

Much attention has been focused on the project.

Will County Board Minority Leader Herbert Brooks Jr. noted at the community meeting that the promise of the recreation center did play a role in passage of the 2014 referendum to raise $19.5 million to pay for park improvements.

“There were people in this room who worked on that referendum,” Brooks said.

The East Side Recreation Center will cost $7.5 million.

The 30,677-square-foot recreation center is going on 3 acres on the south end of Nowell Park. The entrance will be off Mills Road.

Carstens described a pretty tight fit to avoid building on a flood plain – a necessity that delayed construction as the park district mapped out the construction site. But even with those parameters, he said, there is room for expansion.

The field house

The 15,000-square-foot field house inside the recreation center is planned for the equivalent of two gym floors. But the building is designed so that a third gym floor could be added to create a 22,000-square-foot field house.

Even as it is planned now, the field house has space for two high school-sized basketball courts, two volleyball courts and an indoor soccer field. Two batting cages suspended from the roof can be lowered for baseball practice.

The perimeter of the field house will have an indoor walking track, which was not part of the original design.

“We added the indoor track because we heard indoor walking was important,” Carstens said.

The track surface will be softer than what is used on the gym floors, making it suitable for walking or jogging, he said. But the entire field house surface will be made of a rubberized material, which will make the field house adaptable to other uses.

“We’ll be able to not only run sports on it. We’ll be able to have special events, which is important,” Carstens said.

Fitness and preschool

The fitness center was downsized from the original plan. At 3,000 square feet, Carstens said, “It’s an appropriate size for a fitness center for this building.”

But, he added, “Let’s say fitness goes crazy.” Then, the fitness center can be expanded by converting an adjacent multipurpose room to exercise space.

The fitness center will include treadmills, cardio and strength machines, and free weights.

A preschool room was added to the plans – again, Carstens said, because of apparent demand.

“We heard there’s not a lot of preschool opportunities in this area,” he said.

The preschool room can accommodate 16 children. There will be morning and afternoon sessions. If more space is needed, a second multipurpose room located next to the preschool and can be converted.

Construction and delays

“We’d like to start and get the shovels in the ground in August,” Carstens said.

The general contractor is Henry Bros.

Carstens said construction should have started a year ago. In addition to planning needed to avoid floodplains, he said the park district had to make sure a Route 53 Corridor Study being done by the state would not lead to changes that would hurt access to the recreation center. Route 53 runs along the west edge of the park.

The state does plan to re-route Route 52 onto Mills Road, which may lead to the need for center turn lanes outside the recreation center in the future because of increased traffic, Carstens said.

The project has a construction schedule of 10 to 12 months, so the recreation center conceivably could open even before August 2018. Carstens was not promising that, but he did say the November 2018 grand opening date is conservative.

“I really think we’ll have a grand opening in September [2018],” he said.