Will County wrecking ball still hangs over old courthouse

The Will County Board last week showed it is willing to hear redevelopment possibilities for the old courthouse but it did not slow down plans for demolition, County Executive Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant said.

The county board in a 10-9 vote kept alive preservationists’ hopes to save the building by referring a proposal to study redevelopment to its Executive Committee.

The vote showed a willingness to listen. But it did not confirm that the study would be done.

And, Bertino-Tarrant said, it did not change a 2019 vote to demolish the building.

“As far as my office is concerned, the demolition has not been retracted,” Bertino-Tarrant said Friday, the day after the county board vote. “We will continue with the permit process.”

The county has eight bids from companies ready to demolish the 1969 courthouse if they get approval. There also is $2.5 million in the county budget to fund demolition.

Demolition has been stalled by the Joliet Historic Preservation Commission, which has been holding hearings on potential landmark status for the building. That process, however, can only continue until October when the question of landmark status will go to the Joliet City Council, which is believed to be less inclined to save the building.

A city permit will be needed for demolition of the downtown building.

The county board in 2019 was unanimous in its decision to demolish the building. Board membership has changed since then, and the Thursday vote indicated some members who previously voted to demolish are ready to reconsider.

“Everybody looked at that building and said, ‘I hate it,’ ” board Member Jacqueline Traynere, D-Bolingbrook, now a preservation advocate, said of the 2019 vote.

The “hate it” factor has been at least softened by preservationists who have inspired a save-the-courthouse movement while pointing to the stark architecture of the building as representative of the Brutalist school of architecture characteristic of its day.

“It is controversial from the start,” University of St. Francis history professor David Veenstra said of Brutalist buildings as he spoke to the county board last week. “Detractors call this Soviet-style architecture.”

Veenstra, former assistant to the campus historian at the University of Illinois Chicago, said Brutalist buildings on that campus became “the heart” of University Village, a renewed neighborhood with residences and restaurants, and the old courthouse “has the same possibilities.”

“Like everything historical, much of what is old is becoming intriguing again,” Veenstra said.

Whether the county board is intrigued enough to block demolition was not settled last week.

“All they did,” Bertino-Tarrant said, “was vote to have a conversation in committee.”