The thick, rough-faced blocks that form the base of the old Du Page County courthouse in Wheaton tell a story. So, too, do the structure’s castlelike turrets, its arched entryway and its feel of stolid strength.
It is the story of the people who, nearly a century ago, put up the courthouse. It is the story of their pride and their certainty, the story of how they saw themselves and how they saw their world.
That old courthouse, now part of a college campus, is not just a collection of red bricks and mortar. It is, in the unique way of American courthouses, the embodiment of a time. Through that structure, it is possible to meet the people of Du Page County of 1896, to experience them long after they’ve gone.
Or look at the Lake County courthouse in Waukegan, with its gun-slit windows and blank, fortresslike walls. Constructed in the late 1960s, at a time of widespread civil unrest, its architecture tells another tale-one of fear and mistrust. You can feel the edginess of county officials of that era in the way the building turns its back on the street-and, indeed, on life outside its walls.
Or take a drive to the Cook County courthouse in south suburban Markham and the one in southwest suburban Bridgeview and the one in northwest suburban Rolling Meadows. Don’t worry if you think you’re getting confused. You’re right; they are virtually identical.
Although the three were constructed at different times over an 11-year period, each is the same long, low two-story structure with a tan limestone faCade. Each has the same terraced stairway on the side for entry from parking lot or garage. And each features the same grand entrance in front, complete with three towering flagpoles, an entrance that, for all its grandeur, is nonetheless closed to the public.
None of this is without significance: It represents the McDonald’s-ization of government.
The county courthouse is a peculiarly American institution. Before the Revolutionary War, Colonial towns were built around churches. But following independence, it was the county courthouse that became the focal point of the American landscape.
And no wonder, write Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Searle. In an essay in the 1978 photographic book “Court House,” still the most definitive work on the subject, they note: “The pioneer in new country, prior to cutting trees, grubbing stumps and stacking fences, saw to it that his land was partitioned on paper. The paper might be a claim or a purchase, or in time the settler might be after squatter’s rights. Whatever its kind, the resulting paper was sacred; after all, romantic notions aside, it was the paper alone that secured his ownership of land, thus making him a landholder.
“Housing land-deeds safely was no small concern. A place for the protection of official records and vital statistics was practically always estabished early, and it was usually part of the courthouse, often very grand, a sort of jewel box or ark of men’s covenant with the land.”
For much of American history, the county courthouse was a secular cathedral that expressed the hopes, beliefs, aspirations and world view of its people. It was the gathering place for meetings-and for hangings. It was the mustering site for local troops. Often it was the tallest structure in the county. Usually it was the most architecturally distinctive.
Above all, it was a county’s most enduring statement of self-affirmation.
“They wanted to let people know: `We’re here, and we’re prosperous. This is us, and look at our grand building,’ ” explains Albert J. Larson, a cultural and historical geographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a national expert on county courthouses.
The county officials and citizens who built the courthouse, although unschooled in architecture, knew what they wanted. “They wanted the courthouse to look good. They wanted it to look better than the next county over,” Larson says.
That’s no longer true. Today, a new county courthouse evokes little emotional response and has become the government version of a shopping mall with acres of parking and not much to distinguish it from any other suburban office development.
Instead of being the region’s focal point, physically located in the center of the county seat, the courthouse is now being exiled to the outskirts of town, no longer a part of everyday life, out of sight and out of mind.
This transformation is not simply a shift in the use of construction materials and the popularity of architectural styles. The change in the nature of courthouses is a direct reflection of a change in the way people think about government in general.
“Now,” Larson says, “the statement a courthouse makes is a negative statement. It’s, `Oh, God, I’ve got to go down and pay a ticket.’ “
No longer do people identify themselves so closely with government. The semi-religious fervor and sense of community is gone. No longer is the courthouse special. It’s just one more stop to make.
This is perhaps an understandable attitude at a time in American life when government at all levels impinges on the individual to an extent that seems to constantly rise. But it doesn’t reduce the symbolic import of the county courthouse. Indeed, for all their blandness, the newly built courthouses are as eloquent about the people of today as the old ones ever were.
Few places in the nation are as rich in county courthouses as the six-county Chicago metropolitan region, where 17 major structures, spanning nearly 140 years of history, are still standing. (And that number doesn’t include minor courts, such as those in some Chicago police stations; special court buildings, such as Traffic Court in Chicago; or the various temporary quarters used by the courts over the decades because of overcrowding.)
The oldest among the 17 is the three-story, cupola-topped, red-brick building facing the public square in the center of Woodstock in McHenry County. Constructed before the Civil War, the structure is now used as a combination art gallery and museum and is rented out for wedding receptions, business meetings and Christmas parties.
The newest are three courthouses-or, to use the modern nomenclature, judicial centers-that were built between 1991 and 1993 in the collar counties of Du Page, Kane and McHenry.
Unlike the trio of Cook County branch courts, these judicial centers aren’t identical. But they shared the same architects and, in their vague office-park way, look very much alike.
A century ago, courthouses were supposed to be tall and monumental. But the emphasis at these new judicial centers, all of which are located on the far fringe of their county seats, is on the horizontal.
Part of this is an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture, an homage emphasized by the overhanging roof in the center of two of the structures. But part of it also is an effort to mask the massiveness of the building, to give it a more comfortable feel, to make it seem less like a hall of judgment and more like, well, a suburban office building.
In two of the structures, the long flat facade is broken up and softened by horizontal lines of differently colored bricks. And all three feature a grand entrance in the center that becomes the building’s focal point, drawing attention away from its size.
In addition, the two in Wheaton and Geneva abut large geese ponds; for some reason, a geese pond is missing at the judicial center in Woodstock.
The thought of masking the massiveness of the county courthouse would have seemed odd to Americans of the 1800s. For them, the whole idea was to advertise the strength and wealth of the county, so the more monumental the courthouse, the better.
“It represented the importance and the grandeur and the power of local government,” says Larson, who has visited more than 1,700 of the 3,044 county seats in the U.S.
Having the county seat was a big deal for a town in those days, and often the subject of heated controversy.
Du Page County is one example. In 1839 Naperville was designated the county seat, and that’s where the county courthouse was built.
But the Wheatons, an influential family in the area, wanted it closer to the center of the county and, not coincidentally, closer to their farm. They even provided land for a new courthouse, but in 1857 the county’s voters rejected the proposal.
Ten years later, another election was held, and in those days of free-wheeling political campaigns, both sides apparently pulled out all the stops.
The Wheaton family was accused of bringing in jobless men from Chicago to cast ballots, while it was claimed that Naperville made sure that a vote was recorded from every man on its voter list, even if the man wasn’t present for the election. It was even alleged that Naperville men who had been hanged had voted.
The upshot, however, was a thin 51-vote victory for Wheaton, out of more than 3,300 votes cast. But that didn’t end the squabble because Naperville refused to relinquish the precious county records.
So, late one night, a contingent of Civil War veterans from Wheaton sneaked into the Naperville courthouse through a window left open by a double agent and began loading the county record books into a wagon.
They were pretty far along when they were discovered by the local judge, who began ringing the bell of the Congregational Church to bring out Naperville’s defenders. In their haste to escape, the Wheaton raiders had to leave several books behind. (Those books were taken to Chicago for safekeeping and were lost in the Great Fire of 1871.)
And such controversies aren’t just the stuff of ancient history.
Nearly a century later, in the 1960s, the hope that the county seat might intsead be shifted to the center of Lake Counry, around Libertyville, led to an unsuccessful effort to block construction of a new county courthouse in Waukegan.
That fight grew so heated that at one point a leader of the opposition claimed his life had been threatened by a man who jumped into his car and demanded that he “drop the courthouse case.” He didn’t, but the opponents still lost.
Among the 17 major courthouses still standing in the Chicago metropolitan region, four were built before 1900.
Of those, only the Kane County Courthouse, constructed in 1891, at 100 S. 3rd St. in downtown Geneva, is still operating as a court facility. And according to Douglas Naughton, the county’s court administrator, it will continue in operation at least through the year 2015, when the remaining two buildings of the county judicial center on the edge of town will be finished. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the building.
The odds are, however, that it won’t be torn down. A preservation movement, nascent only a couple decades ago, is now a major factor in urban planning decisions across the country.
That movement came too late to save the old courthouse in Waukegan (built in 1878; demolished in 1967) or the one in Joliet (put up in 1879; taken down in 1969). But it did keep the wrecking ball away from three others: the 1892 Criminal Courts Building at 54 W. Hubbard St. in Chicago, now an office building, called Courthouse Place; the 1896 structure in Wheaton, now a site of National-Louis University; and the 1857 courthouse in Woodstock, now the Old Courthouse Arts Center and the Chester Gould Dick Tracy Museum.
The end of the 19th Century signaled the end of courthouse construction throughout much of the Chicago region for nearly 70 years. From 1896 to 1968, only three courthouses were built, all of them in Chicago.
The first was the County Building, put up in 1907 on the eastern half of a downtown block and joined four years later by City Hall on the western half. The two buildings were designed and built as one structure.
The county half served not only as a courthouse but also as the administrative center for Cook County. Then, in 1965, the court functions were moved across the street to the new 32-story Civic Center, built by and now named for Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.
This unornamented but nonetheless starkly beautiful skyscraper courthouse, which was for a time the tallest building in Chicago, is considered an elegant example of the International school of architecture. In its size and its conscious attempt to make a statement, the Daley Center is a throwback-albeit a particularly urban one-to the days when courthouses were meant to be monumental.
Between construction of the County Building and the Daley Center, the only other courthouse built in those years was the Criminal Courts Building, a huge neoclassical structure with traces of the then-newly stylish Art Deco, put up in 1929 at 2600 S. California Ave.
The move of the courthouse to the outer edge of the city, widely criticized at the time and over the years by lawyers and judges, was nearly a half-century ahead of its time. But the impetus for the move wasn’t cultural, it was venal.
The family of Anton Cermak, the Cook County Board president and Democratic Party leader, owned considerable real estate around 26th Street and California Avenue, and Cermak hoped to spark a building boom in the area by moving the courthouse there.
The Great Depression and World War II were major reasons for a relative dearth of courthouse construction in the Chicago region during much of the 20th Century. Also, for the first half of the century, there was little need for new buildings in the still-rural collar counties.
But with the suburban land boom that followed World War II, county officials throughout the Chicago metropolitan region found their courthouses filled to bursting, and they began making plans for new ones.
The first to go up-those in Joliet (1968) and in Waukegan (1970)-were of a style that courthouse expert Larson calls “Brutalist.”
The new one in Joliet features flat-faced walls that, along the bottom, angle in so sharply that the first-floor windows look like giant teeth. “It has a massive and yet coldly impersonal look to it,” Larson says of the Joliet courthouse. “It has that straightup wall that’s almost leaning toward you in a menacing way.”
Luckily, this wasn’t a style that caught on-or perhaps the fears of revolution in the streets simply eased-as, over the next two decades, Cook County built five branch courthouses.
The first, constructed in 1976 in Maywood just off the Eisenhower Expressway, is a horizontal version of the Daley Center, all glass and dark rust-colored steel.
It was followed in 1978 by the first of the identical triplets, the branch court in Markham, which in turn was joined in 1989 by its clones in Bridgeview and Rolling Meadows.
For some reason, the fifth branch court in Skokie, built in 1982, escaped the cookie-cutter and ended up as a red-brick building with postmodern touches. It is, nonetheless, similar to the identical triplets, inasmuch as its grand entrance on Old Orchard Road is closed to the public. Instead, most visitors enter through the rear, across from the garage.
The Cook County courthouse boom was followed by the trio of judicial centers in the collar counties: Wheaton in 1991, Woodstock in 1992 and Geneva in September 1993.
The new courthouse in Wheaton turned out to be a sick building with ventilation problems that caused many county employees to become ill. It was closed between September 1992 and April 1993 so that $3.5 million in repairs could be made. And some workers have complained that the air is still bad.
Larson doesn’t find the three judicial centers as off-putting as the Brutalist courthouses in Joliet and Waukegan. But he does find them bland. Any one of them, he complains, “could be the International Harvester headquarters. Since American values are much more business-oriented, our government buildings look like business buildings.”
That’s how it looks to someone today. But, a century from now, what meaning will be gleaned from the architecture of these judicial centers? What story will they tell about the people of the end of the 20th Century?
Or will these courthouses be long gone by then? And their stories with them?