11 Illinois Buildings With Former Lives Most Residents Never Knew About

Old Cook County Hospital treated patients on Chicago’s Near West Side for more than eighty years before it closed in 2002.

A $140 million restoration turned it into a hotel.

Illinois has a long list of buildings doing something now that has nothing to do with what they were built for.

These are the Illinois buildings with former lives that many residents never knew about.

Tao Chicago

Tao Chicago fills a granite building on North Dearborn Street that spent nearly forty years as the home of the Chicago Historical Society.

Fire destroyed the society’s first headquarters in the Great Chicago Fire, and architect Henry Ives Cobb designed this Richardsonian Romanesque replacement in 1892.

The words “Chicago Historical Society” are still carved into the stone archway over the front door.

The society left for Lincoln Park in 1931.

Excalibur turned the space into one of Chicago’s biggest nightclubs starting in the late 1980s, and the party there ran for 23 years before the club finally closed.

Not anymore.

Tao Chicago has run the building as a restaurant and nightclub since 2018, and the city named it an official Chicago Landmark back in 1997.

Old Cook County Hospital

For more than eighty years, Old Cook County Hospital treated patients on the Near West Side before it shut its doors for good in 2002.

Architect Paul Gerhardt Sr. designed the Beaux-Arts building, which opened in 1916 to serve Chicago’s booming immigrant population.

Doctors there pioneered blood banking and some of the earliest sickle cell anemia care in the country.

Then the building sat empty.

Graffiti crept up its terra cotta facade for close to two decades, and demolition looked likely more than once.

A $140 million restoration turned the old hospital into a dual-branded Hyatt Place and Hyatt House hotel instead.

The finished complex added a food hall, medical offices, and a small museum.

All of it has been open since 2020.

Old Joliet Prison

Old Joliet Prison sells tickets today for guided walks through cell blocks that once held some of Illinois’ toughest inmates.

Convict laborers built its limestone walls starting in 1858, quarrying the stone just a few hundred feet from the site.

For 144 years, the prison operated as a working Illinois penitentiary, later appearing as a filming location for movies including The Blues Brothers.

The cells emptied out.

Governor George Ryan closed the prison in 2002 as a budget-cutting move.

Vandals and arsonists moved into the empty buildings over the next 15 years.

The City of Joliet took ownership of the site in 2017, after the mayor petitioned the state to hand it over.

The Joliet Area Historical Museum opened the old cell blocks for paid walking tours in 2018.

Old Joliet Prison joined the National Register in 2023, recognized as the oldest surviving penitentiary in Illinois.

Obed & Isaac’s

Obed & Isaac’s took over a Romanesque Revival church built in Peoria in 1889.

Architect W.W. Boyington designed it, the same architect behind Chicago’s Water Tower.

The congregation worshipped there for sixty years.

The Masonic Order of the Eastern Star bought the building in 1949 and ran it as the Donmeyer Temple.

Business offices and photography studios cycled through after that.

None of them lasted.

The Conn family bought the sanctuary in 2015.

Obed & Isaac’s opened there the following year, and the building later earned a spot on the National Register once the renovation was finished.

Two Brothers Roundhouse

Two Brothers Roundhouse serves dinner and craft beer inside a 264-foot limestone circle that once repaired steam locomotives for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

Builders raised the first section in Aurora starting in 1856, and two later additions turned it into a 40-sided ring of stalls surrounding a central turntable.

Repair crews serviced engines there for decades.

Diesel power made the work obsolete.

The railroad tore down most of the original shop buildings starting in 1974, leaving only two of the original seven standing.

Aurora’s City Council approved a private investment group led by former Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton to buy and redevelop the roundhouse in 1995.

The roundhouse survived.

It reopened in 1996 as an entertainment complex called Walter Payton’s Roundhouse.

The building is the oldest surviving roundhouse made of limestone in the country.

Two Brothers Brewing didn’t acquire the property until 2011, opening its restaurant and brewery there on June 18 of that year.

Chicago Athletic Association

Chicago Athletic Association now welcomes overnight guests in a building that once turned most of Chicago away entirely.

Founders including Marshall Field, William Wrigley Jr., and A.G. Spalding opened it as a private club in 1893, months before the World’s Fair, with a waiting list ten years long.

Membership dwindled for decades after that.

Then it closed.

By the time the doors shut in 2007, fewer than 500 members remained from a roster that once topped 3,000.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named the empty club one of the country’s 11 most endangered places before developers bought it in 2012.

The boutique hotel that opened in 2015 kept the old gymnasium standing as an event space.

Cairo Custom House

A small history museum fills Cairo Custom House today, though the federal government built it for an entirely different job.

Construction ran from 1869 to 1872, and the finished building served as a customs house, a post office, and a federal courthouse all at once.

Cairo built a new post office in 1942.

A new job followed.

The old custom house became the town’s police station instead.

It joined the National Register in 1973, and it still displays a desk Ulysses S. Grant once used in Cairo.

Galena Depot

Galena Depot handed out train tickets for well over a century before it started handing out brochures instead.

The Illinois Central Railroad built the two-story Italianate depot in 1857 to serve a town then booming from lead mining and river trade.

Passenger trains connected Galena riders all the way to Sioux City, Iowa, on one end and Chicago on the other.

Service stopped when Amtrak formed in 1971.

Then it came back.

A short-lived route called the Black Hawk brought trains back for a few years before service ended again in 1981, this time for good.

The Galena Foundation restored the depot’s brickwork, and today it houses the town’s visitor center.

Old Bakery Beer Company

Old Bakery Beer Company brews craft beer today inside the century-old former home of the Colonial Bakery in downtown Alton.

Bread came out of that building for generations before Colonial Bakery finally closed in the early 1980s.

The 18,000-square-foot building then sat vacant for years, facing the Clark Bridge over the Mississippi River.

No one touched it.

Brewers James Rogalsky and Lauren Pattan, both Alton natives, opened the brewery in January 2015.

They run fermentation tanks in the same garage bay where bakery delivery trucks used to park.

Engine House No. 5

Starting in 1901, Engine House No. 5 protected Springfield’s east side, and it was the only firehouse in the segregated city where Black firefighters were allowed to work.

A historical marker outside the building states its crews were the first to answer the alarm in 1908.

White mobs had set fire to Black-owned homes and businesses that day during the Springfield Race Riot.

Its firefighters didn’t back down.

Fire operations moved out of the building in 1954.

Central Lodge No. 3, a Prince Hall Masons chapter established in Springfield in 1867, has owned the building since the 1970s.

The Masons stepped in that decade to keep the city from tearing it down.

The lodge rededicated the old firehouse in 2011, and restoration of its facade continues today.

Epiphany Farms Restaurant

Epiphany Farms Restaurant serves dinner in downtown Bloomington's old Central Fire Station, built in direct response to a disaster.

The Great Fire of 1900 leveled 45 buildings across four and a half blocks of downtown Bloomington.

Bloomington rebuilt fast.

The city responded by building architect George Miller's North European Renaissance fire station in 1902 for about $30,000.

Firefighters worked out of it until 1974.

It sat empty for a couple of years after that before a remodel turned the old apparatus bay into a dining room.