Illinois
Belvidere, Illinois goes from loser to winner with idled Stellantis plant reopening
BELVIDERE, Ill. (CBS) — The year 2023 was a big one for labor – actors, pilots, delivery drivers, and maybe most of all, autoworkers.
By some accounts, no place in history has benefited from a new contract between the Big Three auto companies and the United Auto Workers than Belvidere, Illinois – about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago. Belvidere is a place that went from being the biggest labor loser to the biggest winner.
Belvidere, Illinois is the type of place where a human actually answers the phone at City Hall. It’s the type of place where Mayor Clint Morris has a Holy Bible on his desk, the Lord is his Shepherd, and professional wrestler Ric Flair is his spirit animal.
Mayor Morris is an independent, who emphasizes that didn’t take any outside money for his campaign. He agreed that this puts him on about an island of one in Illinois politics.
“And of course, with any money that anybody takes, there’s a certain amount of obligation,” said Morris, “and I don’t think anybody is a philanthropist that contacts elected officials, I don’t believe that.”
He won – and dealt with a disaster shortly into his first term.
“Well, I received a call first from Stellantis, their director of governmental affairs out of Washington, D.C., had called me and informed me that they were going to be, quote, ‘Idling the plant,’” said Morris, “and about the same time, actually, my other phone rang, and it was the governor’s office – Governor Pritzker’s office.”
Chrysler parent company Stellantis’ Belvidere Assembly Plant was indefinitely idled at the end of February of last year. More than 1,000 would be out of work.
The news in Belvidere, the City of Murals, was like bucket of paint tossed upon Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
It was a gut punch for plant veteran Deanna Viel.
“This is my survival for me and my three boys,” Viel said. “It’s a lot of emotion. First, you had your whole world crash down. Then, we had the big, ‘OK, we’re going to make it.”
In late October, the announcement came down that the Belvidere plant would reopen after the UAW and Stellantis came to an agreement.
“We are one of the only plants that ever came out of being shut down to be brought back,” Viel said. “So it’s a big thing.”
She took a picture when President Joe Biden came to Belvidere.
With the new UAW contract, there was more news besides the plant reopening.
“We’re going to have a $100 million investment in a Mopar distribution site here, and also a battery facility,” said Mayor Morris.
The mayor himself agreed that he had never heard of a turnaround quite like what Belvidere experienced.
“It is exceptional. It’s the one singular story,” said University of Illinois professor Dr. Robert Bruno, who is also an industry expert and author.” It is truly the lone case in American economic and labor history.”
Nobody knows exactly what went down in the meetings, but Belvidere is strategically located – rail, interstate, on the river, dependable power, good workforce.
So who made the reopening happen?
“The workers made that happen,” said Bruno. “Never before has the UAW, through its collective bargaining process, been able to reopen a facility, pour millions of dollars into the facility and create thousands of jobs.”
Back to Ric Flair, the professional wrestler whose image graces Mayor Morris’ office. It came from his brother, Cliff, and Morris is quick to note that Flair is a winner.
“That’s how I look at this at Belvedere and what we have in the future,” said Mayor Morris. “Not only did we get a reprieve – our future’s a lot brighter here.”
Viel, the worker CBS 2 spoke with, hopes to also have a degree by the time she returns to work – in HR.
Meanwhile, the new UAW contract could bring more than 3,000 jobs to Belvidere, and billions in investment. Whispers are they’ll be making an EV, and potentially a hybrid version of a mid-size Ram pickup.
Editor’s note: This story is part of the Monitor’s summerlong series following old U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California.
Just a few blocks from the Old Joliet Prison, Johnny Williams is standing outside a tire shop, waiting for a repair.
He’s a lifelong resident of the Joliet area, a father of six and grandfather of 10, and he remembers back in the day when the prison was part of the economic engine that made Joliet run.
Why We Wrote This
Route 66 courses through American cities that once flourished before their economies faded or were forced to change. The story of Joliet, Illinois, reflects the high times, the hardships and the reinvention found along the century-old road.
“I remember when people used to sit out there visiting their people — on the buses, you know?” Mr. Williams says. “I have plenty of people whose parents and uncles worked there.” He gestures toward the 25-foot limestone walls, still topped with razor wire. “And as a child, I would always wonder — what’s behind that wall?”
So, he still marvels at how the once imposing former state penitentiary has been transformed over the past decade. Today, the people walking through its front gate are not prisoners or staff, but tourists and Americana-lovers there to have fun and celebrate the centennial of Route 66. The iconic roadway, noted in hundreds of anthems about America, passed right by the prison until 1940, when it was rerouted a few blocks away.
The prison once housed such infamous criminals as Richard Speck, James Earl Ray, and John Wayne Gacy. But since its closing in 2002, it has become a site for concerts, film viewings, and today, an event dubbed “The Big House Ballgame.”
People wondered about the prison for decades, said Quinn Adamowski, board president of the Joliet Area Historical Museum, which now runs the prison, before the game. “This site defined Joliet in many ways.”
After the prison closed, it was largely abandoned, becoming a liability, Mr. Adamowski said, especially in this neighborhood. “In 2017, 160 years after the first inmates arrived, we had the opportunity to wonder what this site could be,” he added. “It was our time – Joliet’s time – to define the prison.”
The Big House Ballgame on April 30, which is the 100th anniversary of the naming of Route 66, featured the Joliet Slammers, a Frontier League baseball team co-owned by actor Bill Murray. It was one of the featured events of an official five-city kickoff of events commemorating America’s “Mother Road.”
Baseball was also part of the prison’s history. In the early 20th century, inmates formed teams and played games against one another and against outside clubs, part of a broader effort to impose order and routine within the prison. The Big House Ballgame today is, in part, an attempt to revive that history — to connect the present moment to something that had once taken place on the same ground.
What happened to Joliet over the past century and a half happened, in some version, to nearly every city and town along Route 66. The collapse of jobs, travel routes, and movement west – and then a slow, uncertain reinvention.
The roadway passed through working America, and then through America after the work was gone. The centennial is, among other things, a celebration of the survival of places that kept going when the economies that made them no longer existed.
***
Curt Herron, like Mr. Williams, has lived in this part of Will County his whole life, growing up in Lockport, a small city just north of Joliet, before spending 45 years as a sports reporter covering high schools, the Slammers, and nearly every sporting event in between. Today, he’s an assistant at the historical museum.
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
“Joliet was always a real working-class city,” he says, pausing in the shadow of a guard tower as a group of tourists photographs the cellblock windows above him. “The second biggest steel city in the country after Pittsburgh. And then, on top of that, a prison city — two prisons within a few miles of each other, running simultaneously for 75 years. Almost nowhere in America can say that,” he says, noting that the area’s other prison, Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, is still in operation.
The steel came first. In 1869, the Joliet Iron and Steel Works opened along the Des Plaines River, drawing on the region’s coal deposits and its limestone – the same blue-gray stone that built the prison walls, the same stone quarried from just beneath the city’s surface – to become one of the great industrial enterprises of the Gilded Age. At its height, it employed thousands of men and produced the railroad rails that stitched together the American West.
Joliet drew immigrant workers in successive waves: first, the Irish who dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1840s; then Poles, Lithuanians, and Eastern Europeans; then African Americans and Mexican migrants during the First World War. Joliet became, in the language of the era, a city of stone and steel – proud of its grit and defined by its labor, built on the conviction that hard work in a hard place was its own kind of American story.
Then, the steel left. By the early 1980s, the mill was gone, and the unemployment rate in Joliet climbed to 26% – among the highest of any city in the United States at the time. The limestone ruins of the ironworks sat empty along the river for decades, overgrown with vegetation, before the Forest Preserve District turned them into a heritage trail.
A wound, converted in time into a park.
“We were known for being a hardscrabble place,” Mr. Herron says. “Because of the prisons and the steel industry and a lot of working-class people. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s also led to a real competitive area – a lot of great athletes have come from here, a lot of people who’ve gone on to do remarkable things.” These include actors Nick Offerman and Melissa McCarthy, two Super Bowl-winning football players, and a WNBA champion.
But transportation has been, and remains, a major driver of Joliet’s economic engine. The Illinois and Michigan Canal and the railroads that followed in the 19th and 20th centuries once spurred its growth. Today, vast inland port complexes make Joliet one of the major freight hubs in North America.
And then, Route 66, which ran directly through downtown, across the Des Plaines River at the Ruby Street Bridge, helped make Joliet a destination for travelers.
The state is betting that Route 66 travel will continue to help the local economy, said Catie Sheehan, the Illinois deputy director of tourism and a Route 66 Centennial commissioner. “Joliet is one of nearly 100 communities along the Illinois stretch of the Mother Road. These towns bring Route 66 to life in so many different ways.”
Her tourism office has funded a suite of new roadside attractions for the centennial: a 20-foot “Tire Tower” for Joliet’s Chicagoland Speedway, a 12-foot penny for Lincoln, Illinois, and a 14-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln for Granite City.
“A lot of Midwestern industrial towns have fallen by the wayside and haven’t recovered,” Mr. Herron says. “Transportation saved the day – it’s always been about roads and waterways here.”
***
Dan Goedert is sitting in the stands at The Big House Ballgame, dressed as a prisoner with a black and white striped shirt.
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
A retired emergency room nurse, Mr. Goedert has posed for a few pictures already. “I just read about this yesterday,” he says. “So, I just came to have a little fun today.”
The group Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues have been playing in the old prison yard, along with local blues singer Sheryl Youngblood. They do a spirited version of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”
But the old prison, like Route 66, has a legendary pop cultural connection. “We like history, and we’re old, so we remember the ‘Blues Brothers,’” says Sue Bradley, a special education teacher sitting on the grass before the game with her husband John, who works in finance. She gestures toward people wearing fedoras and black suits and ties. “You’ll see people dressed like them everywhere here today. This is the prison they got out of at the beginning of the movie.”
It’s a movie that few people in Chicago have forgotten. In the opening scene of the 1980 film, a paroled convict played by the late Chicago native John Belushi – “Joliet” Jake Blues – walks out of the same prison gate here to meet his brother Elwood, also a small-time criminal, played by Dan Aykroyd.
Jake and Elwood set off on a road trip that is, at its heart, a story about the open road as salvation. It made the prison famous in a way that, at the time, 144 years of incarcerating murderers and gangsters had not.
And it made Route 66 — the road that once passed this gate and ran all the way to the Pacific – feel, to generations of viewers and travelers alike, like a road of freedom.
Illinois is receiving $148.8 million from Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family as part of a nationwide $7.4 billion settlement agreement that took effect Friday, marking the state’s latest payout from companies that systematically addicted generations of Americans to opioids.
The money will be doled out over the next 15 years, mostly in the next three, under the deal reached last spring by a coalition of state attorneys general including Illinois’ Kwame Raoul.
“No amount of money will ever put right the devastating effects of Purdue’s and the Sacklers’ prioritization of profits over people’s lives and the welfare of our communities,” Raoul said in a statement. “I will continue to ensure settlement funding is distributed equitably throughout the state to help support programs that are trying to mitigate the opioid addiction crisis.”
A nationwide investigation of Purdue Pharma was launched in 2016 over the company’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic through the over-prescription of painkillers like Oxycontin, and the downplaying of risk for addiction.
Illinois sued Purdue and its owners in the Sackler family in 2019, when Purdue filed for bankruptcy.
The overarching settlement agreement, which permanently bars the Sacklers from selling opioids in the U.S., calls for the family to pay $1.5 billion and Purdue to pay $900 million in the first payment. They’ll also pay $500 million in a year, the same amount in two years and $500 million in three years.
Opioid settlements with other companies linked to the nationwide crisis have totaled more than $58 billion, with Illinois so far earmarked for $1.6 billion.
More than $531 million of that has already been paid out to the state from various distributors and pharmaceutical companies.
About 725,000 people died of opioid overdoses across the country from 1999-2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overdoses spiked in Cook County during the COVID-19 pandemic, to a staggering high of 2,001 deaths in 2022, with 91% of those cases tied to fentanyl. Fatal opioid overdoses have declined since then, with 1,822 deaths countywide in 2023, 1,169 in ‘24 and 687 last year, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Settlement funds are dedicated to addiction treatment, prevention and recovery programs. For more information on treatment for opioid addiction, visit helplineil.org or call 833-2FINDHELP.
Southwest goes red, white and blue for America’s 250. See new plane.
Southwest unveils “Independence One,” a Boeing 737 with “1776” and “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” splashed on the sides of it.
The world’s largest steam train is passing through Illinois as part of its 10-state route across the United States this summer.
The locomotive, officially known as Big Boy No. 4014, is heading east across the Mississippi River starting in late May to help celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
Here’s what we know about the train’s stops in Illinois.
What is Big Boy No. 4014?
Delivered to Union Pacific in 1941, the locomotive was among 25 built to haul wartime freight across the Continental Divide in Wyoming and Utah. Big Boy is the last one running, and in the 1960s was converted to burn oil instead of coal.
Big Boy is 133 feet long and weighs 1.2 million pounds. It traveled more than 1 million miles during its working life hauling freight between Cheyenne and Ogden, Utah. The train typically draws large crowds of rail enthusiasts, and it’s common to see superfans with cameras in hand chasing it in cars.
“Union Pacific couldn’t be prouder to share this powerful piece of history with the nation and to be a part of America’s birthday celebration,” Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena said in a statement. “This tour celebrates our company’s rich 164-year history, our nation’s amazing story and the people who have helped build our great country and our railroad.”
When does Big Boy’s route begin? Where will it depart from?
The train will depart from Union Pacific’s headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 25.
This will be the first time it has crossed the Mississippi River since its westward delivery run in 1941, according to railroad officials.
Where is Big Boy stopping in Illinois? When will world’s biggest train be on display?
The train will stop at the Union Pacific Training Center in West Chicago on June 3. It will be on display south of the West Chicago Metra stop from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. central time.
Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Where can residents watch Big Boy pass through Illinois?
Rail fans can also see the train in action at whistle-stops, generally lasting 15-30 minutes long.
The train will pass B Street Crossing in Sterling, Illinois, between 1:30 and 2 p.m. on Tuesday, June 2. It will then pass by Rochelle Railroad Park in Rochelle from 3-3:15 p.m.
After reaching its eastmost stop in Philadelphia, the train will then head back out west, passing by the Amtrak Depot in Springfield between 10:45-11:15 a.m. on Saturday, July 18. The last public view of the train in Illinois will be at Center St. Crossing in Girard between 1-1:30 p.m.
Full list of Big Boy stops
Big Boy will make the following stops on its journey out east:
- May 30 – Omaha, Nebraska
- June 3 – West Chicago, Illinois
- June 10 – Buffalo, New York
- June 15-16 – Scranton, Pennsylvania
- July 4-5 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- July 9-10 – Altoona, Pennsylvania
- July 14 – Fostoria, Ohio
- July 19 – St. Louis, Missouri
Track Big Boy as it travels across the US
Union Pacific will provide a real-time location tracker for Big Boy, allowing rail fanatics to follow the train on its coast-to-coast tour.
When do tickets for Big Boy go on sale?
Union Pacific Museum patrons will have early ticket access beginning May 1 at 9 a.m. central time. Tickets will go on sale for the general public on May 4.
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