Growing up in the south suburbs, highway journeys often involved the Tri-State Tollway and its peculiarities, the toll plazas and oases.
While the toll booths, or alternately, toll baskets forcing motorists into an easy and unfun version of carseat basketball involving coin combinations equaling 40 cents, were unavoidable, the oases were optional.
And, as it turns out, providing services in a building built on a bridge over the roadway is unique to the Chicago area. Other states may call their rest areas oases, but they’re really just roadside toilets with vending machines, same as all of the downstate rest areas along Interstates 57 and 55 and other freeways.
My parents rarely stopped at oases. We either ate and gassed up before we left town, or our destination involved food. Or perhaps they weren’t fans of Howard Johnson restaurants, which were operating the oases back then. Regardless, we kids stared longingly up at those lucky people looking down at us from giant windows as we sped by underneath.
Anyone who traveled the Tri-State regularly knew when to expect them, and called the structures by name: Lincoln, Hinsdale, Des Plaines, O’Hare and Lake Forest. Most were built in the late 1950s when the Tollway was developed to serve rapidly growing postwar suburbia in a belt surrounding Chicago. Further-flung facilities in Belvidere and DeKalb were added as the Tollway system expanded to the west.
When I became a parent, I made sure to stop at the oases regularly. When the Bulls and Blackhawks would take their annual circus trips out west, my family and I would take our own circus trip to Rosemont, stopping at the O’Hare Oasis first for dinner before settling in for the “Greatest Show on Earth.”
Those days, of course, are gone. While the Ringling Brothers operators are hinting at a comeback several years after ceasing touring, the O’Hare Oasis is long demolished. Last year, the Hinsdale Oasis became the latest victim of Tri-State expansion. The Des Plaines Oasis, which had a cameo in the Blues Brothers film, was the first to go.
Along with the western outliers, two of the Tri-State oases remain, Lake Forest Oasis at the Tollway’s northern extreme and one at southeastern end.
Originally called the Lincoln Oasis, the facility in South Holland was erected 10 years after most of the other oases after the Tollway was enlarged at its link with the coast-to-coast Interstate 80, using funds extracted from motorists during the Tollway’s first decade.
It was designed by Chicago architecture dean Mies van der Rohe’s protégé David Haid, whose most famous building was a glass pavilion built to house sports cars at the Ben Rose House in Highland Park, which was featured in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
In the early 2000s, an effort to make the Lincoln Oasis the welcome center for travelers coming into Illinois from Indiana gained steam, and it was renamed the Chicago Southland Lincoln Oasis. In 2007, the Chicago Southland Convention and Visitor’s Bureau moved into the facility, staffing a kiosk and maintaining an information center.
“There really wasn’t a welcome center coming in from Indiana,” said Kim Kislowski, the agency’s vice president of marketing. “We had this entry point into Illinois where we could get people tourist information, help them with hotels, maps or whatever they might need.”
Exhibits on the Lincoln Highway and a traveling exhibition from the Lincoln Library in Springfield, among others, added to the attraction and hearkened to the oasis’ original name.
Information panels about the Lincoln Highway remain at the Lincoln Oasis, along with the fast food outlets that replaced the Howard Johnson restaurants in the 1980s. There’s also a purveyor of crepes, and a gift shop manned by an artist who sells his paintings too.
Rolanda Hudson, of Riverdale, can be found there several days each week as well, and she loves being at the oasis staffing the Visitor’s Bureau kiosk.
“You get to meet so many different people who are going different places for different reasons,” she said. “It makes every day an adventure. You help these people get to their destinations, and you get to learn about them and their lives.”
A family stopped in the day before, she said, traveling from Florida for an event in Chicago where their son was being honored at a military function. After a long drive, they were happy to stop for a bit at the oasis and learn about the area. And she obliged, offering them travel tips such as her favorite deep dish pizza outlet and Chicago area steakhouse.
“We joked around for about an hour,” she said. “It was really fun. That’s the kind of adventure I get to be a part of.”
She’s talked to travelers from Canada, Mexico, and last week, a woman from France who was on her way to O’Hare Airport and spoke to Hudson through an interpreter. Sometimes, Hudson said, visitors stop back at the oasis on their return trip “and tell me how much they’ve enjoyed what they did and what we talked about.”
“They show me pictures and everything,” Hudson said. “One guy even brought me a keychain.”
The oasis is self contained and somewhat small, she said, so the people who come to work there every day have formed a sort of community. Others who regularly use the services there have become part of that community too.
“Lots of people love this place,” Hudson said. “It’s become part of their routine. When they come through, they stop here. I didn’t realize it until I became a part of it. We know them by name, and some we know just by their voices because they come in so often and say hello. It’s really cool.”
Though the Tollway oases seemingly have become endangered species, neither Hudson nor Kislowski see any dark clouds on the horizon for the Lincoln Oasis.
Hudson said when the Hinsdale Oasis came down, she heard from motorists who were worried about the fate of her workplace.
“A lot of people were concerned,” Hudson said. “They said, ‘You’re not going anywhere are you?’ As far as I know, we’re going to be here, I tell them.”
Kislowski said the section of I-80/294 straddled by the Lincoln Oasis is wider than most parts of the Tollway, and she hasn’t heard of expansion plans similar to those that doomed the oases to the north.
In fact, plans are in the works to expand exhibitions at the Lincoln Oasis, making it more of a destination in of itself.
“The more we can add, the more of a stop-off it is, which will be nice,” she said.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].