1897: The Hotel Riverview Burns

The Hotel Riverview is shown in August, 1887, shortly after it opened. The crowd on the grounds consisted of more than 1,600 members of the Chicago Retail Grocers Association, which held its annual picnic there. Visible at left is the Kankakee River excursion steamboat, the Minnie Lillie, which made regular stops at the hotel. (Kankakee County Museum Photo Archive)

By Jack Klasey

June 7, 2025

“We…saw Goodwin leaning out of his window crying for help,” C. Bonnell told a reporter for the Kankakee Gazette on November 12, 1897. He was describing a dramatic event that took place during a devastating early morning fire which destroyed Kankakee’s elegant Hotel Riverview.

Bonnell continued, “McCorn, LaParle, Connor, Taylor, and myself held a mattress and Goodwin let himself down from the window, hanging at arm’s length from the sill. He dropped feet-first, like an arrow. He struck the mattress squarely, wrenching it from our hands and rebounded against the stone foundation. He complained of his back hurting him. We carried him away from the heat, and he was taken to the residence of his friend, Warren Hickox.”

Despite his drop from a fourth-story window, Robert D. Goodwin apparently escaped serious injury. Interviewed by a Gazette reporter later in the day, Goodwin was “too lame in the small of his back to get out of bed. He was lamenting his inability to participate in the football game at Momence as much as the loss of his personal effects.”

Employed as a clerk in the Kankakee office of the Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa Railroad, Goodwin was one of forty guests and hotel employees occupying the hotel when the fire was discovered at about 2:30 a.m.  Emory Cobb, one of the hotel’s owners, “was awakened by the smoke coming into his suite of three rooms on the second floor. Without waiting to dress, he ran down into the boiler room in the basement, which was so densely filled with smoke that he could not enter.” Cobb awakened two hotel employees, manager R. LaParle and night porter Henry Coash; the three men began pounding on room doors and shouting to rouse the sleeping guests and employees.

The 80-room hotel, designed primarily for use as a summer resort, had been built in 1887 by Cobb and two railroads, the Illinois Central and the “Big Four” (Cincinnati, Indiana, St. Louis and Chicago). A rustic, four-story wooden structure topped by a hexagonal tower, the Hotel Riverview was located in “Cobb’s Woods,” on a triangular site bounded today by Chicago Avenue, Greenwood Avenue, and Park Place.

Promotional literature for the hotel featured glowing descriptions of the building and its amenities, noting that it offered guests a dining room with seating for 150, a barber shop, smoking room, billiards room, and several formal parlors. The advertisement concluded, “The house has every beauty and convenience that modern invention and money can supply as completely as any hotel in New York or Chicago.”

Most of the guests arrived in Kankakee aboard Illinois Central or Big Four trains. Some were transported from the railroad stations to the hotel by free carriages, others on one of the Kankakee Street Railway’s trolley cars, and many as passengers on Captain Billy Gougar’s Kankakee River steamboat, the “Minnie Lillie.”

During the first five years of its existence, the Hotel Riverview thrived, attracting a steady stream of guests. For the 1893 season, hopes were high for a successful year because of the World’s Fair being held in Chicago. Unfortunately, a financial panic that year curtailed the plans of many travelers, seriously affecting the hotel’s business.

To make up for lost revenue, the hotel management began accepting long-term residents, leasing rooms or suites on a monthly or yearly basis. Among the first year-round residents were Emory Cobb and his wife, who had lost their home on Cobb Boulevard to a fire. By the time that the Hotel Riverview was destroyed in November, 1897, approximately half its guest rooms were leased to long-term residents.

The dramatic escape of R. D. Goodwin from the burning building was not the only leap to safety on November 12. Another hotel resident, C.W. Best, who lived on the third floor, related his experience to the Gazette: “I had been quite busy during the day and was sleeping soundly. I was awakened by the cries of some of the ladies in the hall. I opened the door of my room and found the hall filled with fire and smoke. It was impossible to escape in that direction, so I opened the window and began throwing my personal effects to the ground. I took the mattress from the bed and threw it out also, expecting it would fall beneath the window and break the force of my fall when I jumped. The wind carried the mattress some distance, so that availed me nothing. While I was preparing to jump, I could hear the windows in the adjoining rooms breaking, and could see the flames coming toward my room. Realizing that I had but a few seconds in which to save myself, I jumped and landed upon a pile of rocks.”

Best suffered a broken ankle, and was taken to Emergency Hospital. The Gazette noted that “...[he] is resting quite comfortable this afternoon.” Best and Goodwin, the two men who jumped to avoid the flames, suffered the only injuries. All the other guests and employees who lived in the hotel escaped unscathed, but most lost all of their possessions.

The newspaper reported that the fire, which began in a basement storage room, was “drawn up the back staircase which acted as a chimney in creating a current of air. The wide corridors further facilitated the progress of the flames, which ran along the oiled and resinous Southern pine with which the interior of the building was finished, with terrible rapidity….Within an hour, the noble structure was a mass of smoldering ruins.”

By the time the sun rose over Kankakee on that November morning, all that remained of the Hotel Riverview was the stone foundation and four tall brick chimneys. The hotel, which had cost $85,000 to build ten years earlier, was insured for only $20,000. The owners decided not to rebuild.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.