Joliet: Blues Brothers, Limestone, and Route Sixty-Six

Jake Blues carries the nickname Joliet Jake, and when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi filmed the opening scene of the movie in nineteen seventy-nine, they shot it right here: Jake Blues being released from prison as his brother waits at the gate. The location was the Joliet Correctional Center, a working prison at the time, built in eighteen fifty-eight of locally quarried limestone by prisoners brought in from Alton, Illinois. The architect was William W. Boyington, the same Chicago designer who built the Water Tower that survived the Great Chicago Fire. The old prison closed in two thousand two and now operates as a museum and filming location.

Joliet itself is older than the movie mythology suggests. Charles Reed built a cabin here in eighteen thirty-three, and James Campbell, the treasurer of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, platted the town the following year. The canal, completed in eighteen forty-eight, made Joliet a transshipment point connecting the Great Lakes to the Illinois River and eventually the Mississippi, turning a frontier settlement into a real industrial town. The canal linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, and Joliet sat on that corridor.

In eighteen sixty-nine the Joliet Iron and Steel Works opened along the Des Plaines River, and for a generation this was one of the great steel towns of the Gilded Age. The steel industry declined, as it did across the Midwest, but Joliet adapted, eventually building a reputation as a racing city. The Chicagoland Speedway opened just west of town in two thousand one. Between the prison, the canal, the steel heritage, and Route Sixty-Six running straight through the old downtown, Joliet carries more American history per block than most cities twice its size.