The Death of East Avenue

By Jack Klasey

June 28, 2025

_____________________________________________________________________________

NOTE: I recently discovered this “obituary” for Kankakee’s original business street, which I had written for the August 25, 1967, edition of the Kankakee Daily Journal. Although it first appeared more than a half-century ago, I thought today’s readers still would find it interesting and educational.

_____________________________________________________________________________

East Avenue, once a prominent Kankakee business street, died this year, following a long illness.

Surviving are two stepsons, Court Street and Schuyler Avenue, and a number of nieces and nephews in various parts of the city.

East Avenue was born in 1853, a child of the Illinois Central Railroad and the Associates Land Co., and spent its early days in a flurry of building in the young boom town of Kankakee.

For many years, the street was a stopping place for both the famous and the humble when they visited Kankakee. They stayed at hotels as fancy as the Exchange and Fenouille’s European, or as unpretentious as the Farmer’s Home.

There was U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant,” who stepped off an Illinois Central train and made his way up East Avenue toward the courthouse. He was campaigning against a backwoods lawyer who signed his letters, in a sprawling hand, “A. Lincoln.”

The famous English actress, Laura Keene, brought a bit of culture to the raw new town, and its mud-rutted main street, when she gave an evening of readings in 1854. Eleven years later, the same actress watched, horrified, as mad, tragic John Wilkes Booth leaped from a box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington where she was appearing in the comedy, “Our American Cousin.” Booth had murdered a member of the audience, the same “A. Lincoln,” now President of the United States.

East Avenue often saw frivolous sights —the high-spirited young men of the town who shinnied up the ornate iron posts to light their cigars at the gas flame of the streetlights (a subject for complaint by Ald. John Fenouille in the 1880s) and the portly figure of Allan Pinkerton, the world-famous detective, rolling majestically across the pavement to a saloon, with upraised fingers indicating the number of beers he wanted. The detective maintained an estate, “The Larches,” near Onarga, and made it a habit to stop for refreshment at Kankakee while the Illinois Central train took on water and coal at the station.

And often, the tramp of marching feet echoed from the street’s building fronts—in 1862, in 1898, 1917, 1942—as Kankakee’s young men went off to war.

But by the turn of the century, the street was middle-aged and a bit careless about appearances. There was a stretch of peeling paint here, a cracked sidewalk there, the dusty windows of a vacant storefront over there.

A younger, lustier street, with the name of Court, had begun to draw away the shoppers and the visitors. And an even younger street, Schuyler Avenue, was becoming lined with stores and shops, behind the back of old East Avenue.

As the years went by, more paint peeled. More sidewalks became bumpy, cracked and broken. More empty store windows acquired a coating of dust.

In the final years of the 1890s, the street gained a new, but short, lease on life, as the railroad opened a new station at the foot of Merchant Street, and the bright scurrying little cars of the Kankakee Electric Street Railway hummed up and down the East Avenue hill.

But a new station and busy streetcars couldn’t turn back the tide of blight which had struck the once-proud street. Even the old, familiar names began to pass away. The Exchange Hotel, bright center of the city’s social life for so many years, became the Commercial Hotel, and began the long slide downward to oblivion. At the last, it was a haven for the unfortunate and the unwanted, for the drifters and the pathetic, lonely oldsters who could afford nothing better.

The same fate overtook the European, which had been the triumph of builder James Lillie’s art. In its later years, the hotel’s once-elegant front of cut limestone and plate glass bore a new name, the Alamo, and its clientele matched that of the neighboring Commercial.

It was the Alamo that provided the first sign that the street’s illness was fatal. On Feb. 24, 1964, a cacophony composed of shouts, sirens, the roaring of flames and the thunder of collapsing floors broke the early morning stillness. The Alamo had burned.

Before the day was out, a new sound echoed down the tired row of buildings in the 200 block. There was the staccato popping of a bulldozer’s exhaust and the crackling and crunching of bricks and splintered wood beneath its steel tracks. The historic debris was trucked away, to be buried without ceremony in some low spot of ground under the unromantic name of “landfill.”

It was about this time, probably, that the decision was made—the decree that East Avenue must die in the name of progress toward revitalizing downtown Kankakee. It was, in a sense, a mercy killing, with the wrecker’s sledgehammer and ripping bar merely speeding up the work which slow decay and time would eventually have accomplished.

When, specifically, did East Avenue die? No one can say for sure, and some might maintain that it lives as long as one building stands. But symbolically, at least, the street died on June 20, 1967.

On that date, the last, definite, direct link with the street’s earliest days was snapped by the closing of the EP System clothing store. The store, believed to be descended in a direct line from the Minchrod and Eppstein clothing firm which opened in 1858, followed the path worn by many East Avenue businesses through the years, moving up the hill to Court Street.

East Avenue appears to be dead, but is it? Not really. It will live on as a series of attractive, landscaped parking lots for use by those shopping on the newer, younger streets.

_____________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE: Although the hoped-for revitalization of downtown Kankakee in the late 1960s failed to meet expectations, the former 100 block of East Avenue has developed into a vital part of today’s downtown. The Harold and Jean Miner Festival Square is the site for the popular annual Merchant Street Music Fest and other events, and the former Illinois Central depot building is home to city offices and the Kankakee Railroad Museum.

_____________________________________________________________________________

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