FEATURE image: Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66, 2007, 396 N. Chicago Street, Joliet, Illinois. Tribute mural on Motor Row.
Joliet, Illinois, is a city of nearly 150,000 people about 45 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. Joliet is famous in popular culture for its appearance in the opening credits and scene of the 1980 comedy film, The Blues Brothers, starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd as musical men dressed in black, the fictional “Joliet” Jake and Elwood Blues. In addition to the very real old limestone walls of Joliet Prison at dawn (the prison complex itself closed in 2002), the film also begins with a dramatic flyover of Joliet’s old steel mills in operation at night.
Though the city of Joliet takes pride in this cinematic heritage, its manufacturing mills were vacated in the early 1980’s. The former steel mills and prison each ghostly stand today about one mile away from Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66, a pair of colorful murals that are all just part of Joliet’s recorded history that reaches back to the 17th century.
CREATED IN 2007, TROMPE-L’OEIL ACRYLIC MURALS CHEVY DEALERSHIP: A TRIBUTE TO ROUTE 66
The 2007 acrylic murals called Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66 is the artists’ imagined depiction of a Chevrolet automobile showroom in Joliet, Illinois in the mid-1950s. Newer than other murals in the city, the paintings are in remarkable physical condition on an exterior wall along a high-trafficked downtown street corner often in direct sunlight. The 10-by-15-foot murals were created by a team of artists led by Marion Kryczka, a Chicago-based artist and longtime professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The artists who matured under Kryczka’s mentorship are today accomplished artists in their own right.
SERIES OF MURALS DISPLAYED ON THE EXTERIOR WALLS OF A 1930’S CHEVROLET SHOWROOM BUILDING
The downtown Joliet building at 396 N. Chicago Street displaying the 21st century murals had been the original showroom of Winston Chevrolet, a busy auto dealer in the mid-1930s and 1940s. In 1955 the dealership was acquired by Bill Jacobs, Sr. A vintage photograph from that time connected to the mural shows a bevy of new and used cars lined up and parked around the perimeter of the building apparently awaiting customers.
The acrylic mural of Bill Jacobs’ dealership in the 1950s is imbued with cultural and historical significance. Bill Jacobs Chevrolet, which opened in 1955, stayed in the family until it was sold in 2015.
BY 2010 BILL JACOBS AUTOMOTIVE GROUP EMPLOYED 500 PEOPLE AND SOLD LOTS OF CARS AND TRUCKS
The founder’s son, Bill Jacobs, Jr., bought the dealership from his father in 1978 at 23 years old. In 2010, Bill Jacobs, Jr., following a 7-year battle with cancer, passed away at 55 years old. Starting at this showroom building in 1955, Bill Jacobs Automotive Group had, by 2010, expanded to five Chicagoland dealerships. It employed almost 500 people and generated about $300 million in annual sales. Mrs. Jeanne Jacobs, the wife of Bill Jacobs, Sr., and Bill Jacobs, Jr.’s mother, passed away in October 2020. It was because of Jeanne Jacobs that her husband Bill Jacobs, a university professor, entered the car business. Jeanne Jacobs’ father owned a car dealership in Chicago where Bill Jacobs worked before he bought his own dealership in Joliet in 1955.
Since the 1970s, artist Marion Kryczka has had a career as an artist. Mr. Kryczka’s drawing is rooted in his foundation as a figurative artist and a lively technique which uses realism as a launching point to create familiar, beautiful, and meaningful scenes. For Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66, Krycka’s painting imagines a realistic American social scene which reflected Bill Jacobs Sr.’s business philosophy. Mr. Jacobs believed that business is about people and the mural’s showroom is filled with people who worked, lived and played in Joliet in the mid-1950’s. For a public mural like this one, community input was an important part of the process. There were group design sessions and meetings with city officials, with the city approving topics and contracting for the projects. For historic pieces, local residents sometimes posed.
MURALS FACE U.S. ROUTE 66, A 20TH CENTURY NATIONAL ROAD, AT JACKSON STREET IN JOLIET, ILLINOIS
The placing of Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66 in the mid20th century in the middle of the 1950’s helps express several important historical facets about the building, its car dealership, and the road (U.S. Route 66) that runs past it. In this art project are displayed many facets of Joliet’s rich heritage.
The mural is directly meaningful as a display of Joliet, Illinois, especially as it developed into a vibrant city where the Jacobs and many others put down roots. The mural also expresses the profound economic and cultural impact of the car industry in Joliet at that time reflecting national trends. Finally, it evokes the popularity of the legendary U.S. Route 66 which had opened in 1926 and followed a quilt of interconnected state and county roads for motor travel from Chicago, Illinois, through Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and all the way to Santa Monica, California in Los Angeles County. Chevy Dealership: A Tribute to Route 66 shows Joliet’s connection and contribution to this important larger national phenomenon.
MURALS DEPICT A UNIQUE MOMENT IN HISTORY THAT IS FOREVER CHANGED
The mid1950s for the Chevy dealership mural depicts that unique historical moment when old Route 66, just then 30 years old, was already on the threshold of major change. In the mural U.S. Route 66 was still in its hey-day—though, at the very same time, it was headed for a rapid and transformative decline.
In 1956 the Federal Aid Highway Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Eisenhower. It authorized $25 billion for the construction of over 40,000 miles of an Interstate Highway System. The bill was the largest public works project in American history—and quickly displaced U.S. Route 66 as a major throughway.
MORE ON THE JOLIET, ILLINOIS, PUBLIC ART MURAL PROJECT
In the early 1990s, Joliet started a public art mural project. Contemporary art murals were created throughout the city often on exterior building walls or under viaducts. Several of these early murals, after 30 years being constantly exposed to the harsh weather conditions in summer and winter, are today in varying need of restorative work. Whether as an individual mural or as part of a series, these public murals have looked to depict in contemporary art the diversity of Joliet life in more than five centuries of its history.
Depicted in painted murals placed at strategic points throughout the city, it presented the various historic periods, people, and significant activities that preceded and followed Joliet’s establishment.
WIDE PRAIRIES, DEEP RIVERS — AND THE I&M CANAL NATIONAL HERITAGE CORRIDOR
After many hundreds of years living on the undulating prairie with its deep rivers, Native American communities were met and later expelled by European explorers and settlers. This displacement process in Joliet’s history began in 1673 when French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet (1645-1700) guided a French Jesuit, Père Jacques Marquette (1637-1675), up the Des Plaines River and camped just south of today’s downtown. As inevitable as it would seem to be, there are other theories as to how the city of Joliet was named besides after Louis Jolliet.
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came a proliferation of canals, various industries, railroads, and quarries that saw the economic boom of this northern Illinois city surrounded by a broad geographical area of farms. In 1964, Joliet’s significance in the development of this part of the nation’s interior was officially recognized with the establishment of the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor designation.
SOURCES:
https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/events/marion-kryczka
https://patch.com/illinois/plainfield/car-dealer-bill-jacobs-55-dies-after-7-year-cancer-fight
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-12-07-9712070397-story.html
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/96summer/p96su10.cfm Richard F. Weingroff. Summer 1996.
—all sites retrieved December 4, 2020.
