A diamond in the roughage

Jan. 7 – Joliet, IL

The odd January warmth continued into Monday and brought with it freakish summer-like storms; that afternoon, a tornado touched down in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, which we had traversed just hours before. We arrived without incident, but the eerie winter lightning and the freshening gale, while blessedly mild, made us wonder what kind of evening lay ahead of us in Joliet, Illinois.

You wouldn't expect Joliet to be a very nice place, perhaps because on the map its name looks suspiciously close to "toilet", and maybe rightly so, since the map also shows it to be located at the business end of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, whose original function was to divert the big city's sewage away from Lake Michigan so it wouldn't show up in their drinking water. But before it became part of Chicago's municipal plumbing system, Joliet was a legitimate port on a real canal, the Illinois and Michigan (which is to New Orleans as the Erie Canal is to New York City), and its name was spelled Juliet.

While it is indeed a recently down-and-out burg, from what I could see in the early winter night the town seems to be fighting its way back to life. There were some pretty little rhinestone buildings and the gaudy zirconium of Harrah's Casino, but by far the crown jewel of Joliet is the Rialto Square Theatre. Its auditorium is decorated as opulently as any of the great European concert halls and has acoustics you could swim in, and the almost sepulchral outer lobby approaches both the elegance of the Library of Congress and the grandeur of Grand Central Station. It is unquestionably one of the most beautiful performance venues in America, and it sits just blocks away from the mouth (?) of Chi-town's sewage discharge channel. Ain't that always the way.

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