Joliet: Where Route 66 Began Its Run

Route Sixty-Six was born in November of nineteen twenty-six, and Joliet was the first major city it touched after leaving Chicago. That made this canal town, thirty miles southwest of the Loop, the first stop on the most famous road in America.

Joliet's origins run deep. French explorer Louis Jolliet, for whom the city is named, passed through this stretch of the Des Plaines River in sixteen seventy-three on his return from exploring the Mississippi with Father Jacques Marquette. The spelling drifted over the centuries; the city kept a single L while the explorer kept two. By the early eighteen hundreds the waterway was already earning a reputation: the Illinois and Michigan Canal, completed in eighteen forty-eight, linked the Great Lakes to the Illinois River here, and Joliet became an inland freight hub.

The city earned a second identity that it has never entirely shaken. The Joliet Correctional Center, a massive limestone fortress built in eighteen fifty-eight, loomed over the city for nearly a century and a half. The prison became so embedded in American popular culture that the Blues Brothers used it as their opening image. Jake Elwood picked up right outside those walls. The facility closed in two thousand and two and has since been a filming location, an attraction, and a source of ongoing debate about what to do with a structure that size.

In the Route Sixty-Six era, Joliet was a working-class industrial city: steel, limestone quarrying, and the railroad. The road brought travelers through on their way to the Great Plains and the Pacific, and local diners and motor courts flourished on the traffic. The Rialto Square Theatre, opened in nineteen twenty-six, the same year as the highway, brought the gilded excess of downtown movie palaces to a canal town.

Today Joliet is the fastest-growing city in Illinois. But for anyone following old alignment maps through town, it's still the place where Route Sixty-Six first stretched its legs and headed west.