Construction has started on the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum on Route 66 in downtown Joliet, and a Chicago-area radio station showed artist’s renderings of what the museum will look like, inside and out.
Earlier in the year, the museum’s organizers bought a 1920s three-story building at 9 W. Cass St. in Joliet. The structure sits between the northbound and southbound lanes of Illinois 53, aka Route 66.
It’s down the block from the Joliet Area Historical Museum and next to Juliet’s Italian Restaurant. It also is across the street from The Forge, a popular nightclub.
Ron Romero, who is guiding the creation of the museum, told WBBM radio in Chicago:
Romero said the museum will celebrate Illinois’ music legends and will feature instruments, sheet music, and memorabilia from all kinds of musicians tied to Illinois.
“I was inspired by Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen’s exhibit at Rockford’s Burpee Museum. It was beautiful. He kept everything. The joke was that he even saved his fifth grade lunch ticket and he did,” he laughed. “I just want to bring things that people will say, ‘Wow, you don’t see that on the internet, I didn’t know about that photo or that guitar.'” […]
“Despite the name being rock & roll, we want to encompass every music. It’s jazz, it’s blues, it’s country, there’s R & B, there’s gospel, there’s metal. Any kind of music, there is somebody in Illinois that has been successful with it. We want to acknowledge and preserve that music that has been in existence,” he said.
The WBBM report also contains renderings of the museum space, including a radio station and display and an exhibit about Chicago’s Chess Records label on the first floor, more exhibits on the second floor and performing arts venue and gallery on the third floor.
The renderings were done by Ethos Workshop Architects of nearby Naperville.
Romero hopes to raise $6 million for the museum and have it open by summer.
(Artist’s rendering of the front of the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum on Route 66 via Facebook)