Today`s Roadtrip

JK Knives

JK Knives

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We drove out to Peru to go to our favorite antique store (got some old books, I`ll post about them after I look through them) today and on the way back took Rte 6 through the small towns. We always pass by a historical marker about some mansion in LaSalle, so we decided to go see it. It has 56 rooms, 16000 square feet of space, and was built in 1874! Well you all know about my facination with old buildings, but this was incredible!

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This is the one across the street, they are going to be restoring it too.

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Wow, from the photos it looks like limestone.

I enjoy seeing Victorian homes restored properly (takes some deep pockets).
 
We got to tour about 12 of the rooms, incredible! 14' ceilings, fireplace in each room, inlaid wood flooring, and really nice wood moldings. They offer private tours if you are a member ($25 per year) of the entire house, that takes around 9 hours. It has a ground floor, 3 upper floors, a basement, and a sub basement. The guy who had it built made his fortune in zinc, and later founded Open Court Publishing Company.
 
Very cool buildings. Good looking horse sitting out front too.
 
Wish I would have known of this place when I was in Peru last year training with my K9
 
Cool building, at first glance it reminded me of the front of the Bates hotel :p. but it is cool, ever wonder what someone needed with 16000 sq ft of space? Just goes to prove there is history all around us, we just need to find it in those off the beaten path or towns of America.
 
Very cool! One of my favorite things growing up (especially when I was living in the south) was finding old places like that. My great grandmother had a small antique shop attached to her house in Supply, NC for 40+ years. Really miss that place, and her. Thanks for bumping this up!
 
There's a house in LaGrange on LaGrange Road that looks just like a minature version of the mansion. We got a chance to walk thru the house during an estate sale a few years back. I was really struck how large and looming the house was from the outside but the rooms seemed much smaller once you were inside. I was mentioning this to my wife and one of the people that was working at the estate sale told me that feel was partially because the exterior stone walls were 19" thick! The home was commissioned by one of the town fathers for his daughter and her new husband and the dad wanted to give her a home that was built to last. I think he was pretty successful in that regard.

I used to be a Board Member for the Frank LLoyd Wright Preservation Trust and spent a ton of time in both his Home & Studio in Oak Park as well as Robie House in Chicago, so I became a fan of his work by spending time in those structures and understanding his genius for scale, flow and detail. From all the history I heard about FLW, I don't think I would have liked him very much as a person but he truly was a master of design.
 
Years ago, I did a lot of work for the state of Massachusetts. We got to visit alot of these state properties where they had alot of old buildings (more like campuses). In checking out pathways for cabling and such, we got to see alot of the back areas, steam tunnels, crawl spaces, etc. They sure knew how to build buildings back then. It was a shame to see them fall into disrepair. They were rehabbing some here and there, but I guess it was easier to just build new buildings. Saw alot of cool things, and some not so cool things...
 
glennbad said:
Years ago, I did a lot of work for the state of Massachusetts. We got to visit alot of these state properties where they had alot of old buildings (more like campuses). In checking out pathways for cabling and such, we got to see alot of the back areas, steam tunnels, crawl spaces, etc. They sure knew how to build buildings back then. It was a shame to see them fall into disrepair. They were rehabbing some here and there, but I guess it was easier to just build new buildings. Saw alot of cool things, and some not so cool things...
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Can you explain more on this, you have me curious!
 
Sure...for example, one of the groups we did work for was the Department of Mental Health. We'd go to these old sites, and wander around in the basements. Aside from it being pretty creepy in these old buildings, we'd see stuff like shackles and chains still hanging from the walls, rooms(cells) with lockable iron gates, morgue rooms, what looked like blood smears on the walls, etc., where they used to lock patients up. The way it was explained was, back in the day, if you were not considered "normal", they just locked you up in those type of places. They didn't have the science or medical knowledge to diagnose autism, dyslexia, or stuff like that, so they just lumped you in with the true crazies. I guess alot of bad things happened that they don't like to bring up...

The other one I remember was the Department of Mental Retardation (what they called it back then), where at one of the sites, they used to experiment on the patients, irradiating them or doing drug trials on them. I don't think the families of the patients knew about this at the time. It came out later.

The other kinda creepy one was at this one site, where the facilities guy hands me this huge iron key, and says it's all that remained of the original mental hospital. Seems a patient set fire to the place...
 
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