The loss of a proposed boat launch near downtown could lead to higher visibility for a historic ice cream store.
City Manager John Mezera said this week that the city is pursuing a National Park Service restoration grant for the Rich & Creamy store in the 900 block of Broadway St.
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Mezera said the site’s design is typical of ice cream stores that dotted Route 66 in the national thoroughfare’s heyday, when Broadway was a leg of the highway in Joliet.
The store is “the only one of its kind left” in the area, he said.
Some of the grant would cover the cost of interpretive signs in the 10-acre park on the west side of the Des Plaines River, where the Rich & Creamy store sits. The signs would address the relevance of the ice cream store and Route 66.
The store replaces a proposed launch as the central attraction of the 10-acre Broadway Greenway.
City officials had acquired land on the west side of the Des Plaines River from the Metropolitan Reclamation District, using a $141,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The launch was a key part of the grant request.
But the city had to change plans–and repay the grant–after the River Carriers Association and the Coast Guard successfully lobbied the Army Corps of Engineers to not allow the launch.
“We thought we picked out a good spot,” Mezera said. “They don’t want to see anything that’s going to go into a 300-foot-wide channel.”