Illinois’ long-closed Joliet Correctional Center opens for public tours on Tuesday. The Chicago Tribune describes it as “surrounded by a 25-foot-tall limestone wall that looks like it was dipped into a cauldron of bile.” The administration building, the castle-looking centerpiece of the facility, was built 160 years ago. It was never intended to appear pleasant, but rather, consciously impervious, intimidating and scary. The prison, one of the largest in the nation at the onset of the 20th century, has been a tourist preoccupation as early as the 1880s, when local civic leaders first worried their home was fast becoming known as “The Prison City.”
The archives of the Joliet Area Historical Museum hold more than a few good reasons for their concern: deep in the stacks are century-old keepsakes, spoons and humidors, coin trays and marble cheese plates, all imprinted with the gothic skyline of the Joliet prison, morbid souvenirs sold to the flood of tourists who would travel from near and far to visit the city’s already iconic monument to incarceration. Inside those walls, men were kept in stockades, and doubled into cells not much larger than farm wagons, with little ventilation, scant sunlight and no toilets until the 1950s. In its first decades, even as it was operating, the prison charged 25 cents for a tour, handing each visitor a card instructing them to please not talk to or point at the criminals. After the facility was abandoned in 2002, its spooky, neglected grounds still attracted the curious — mostly teenagers and vandals. Tours will begin modestly, one or two a day, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only. Tickets are $20 a head. Docents will include local amateur historians — and a few former prison guards. The tours, the Tribune says, are “a study in ruin porn, with a mild dose of urban spelunking.”