Running Around Illinois: Kankakee

February 3, 2024

Winterfest 5K

Kankakee (Kankakee County)

Gun Time: 26:30.4

Kankakee was one of the largest not-purely-suburb cities in Illinois which I had never spent any time in. According to one page, it’s the 91st largest city, with a population of 24,795, which puts it between Morton Grove and Zion, which doesn’t sound like a big city. But it was actually larger than that all the way back in 1950. It is a city, with an urban history and urban problems, like Danville or Belvidere.

Here’s the thing which makes Kankakee unlike a lot of other small cities, especially around the Midwest: it’s a majority-minority city. And it’s segregated, with whites more so southwest of the river. And it adjoins Bradley, population about 15,000, but over 95% white, which in turn adjoins Bourbonnais, population about 19,000, about 75% white. So what you have here is an older municipality, with older infrastructure, older housing stock, segregated, and with more affluent people in the area more so congregated in whiter adjoining towns. This all presents a whole lot of challenges.

I am especially drawn to places like this. Having grown up in Rockford, a mid-sized city which has historically had a lot of confounding economic problems, I’ve found that proper cities across Illinois (and also neighboring states) have had particular difficulty adjusting to an economy that both centralized and globalized after the 1960s. Cities have urban infrastructure which requires maintenance, but as these places become more and more part of a global economy, the cash in circulation increasingly tends to leave. From the A&P to Walmart to Amazon, the basic cash outlay people make daily tends not to recirculate locally. So what is a locality which has some but not a lot of critical mass supposed to do?

This was the main topic of conversation immediately after the race when I met my friend Sapphira at Knack Brewing, the kind of place which did not exist in most small cities like Kankakee a decade ago, but which represents an evolution of thought in what a smaller place can be. Sapphira so happens to work for the City of Kankakee and her job involves talking to people about such things.

Knack Brewing sits just below the river, at a bend hugging U.S. Routes 45 and 52. It’s in a small pocket which feels kind of like the post-industrial-other-side-of-the-river that I encountered a few months ago in Blue Island, but which then spills into what I think is the part of the city which got constructed in the postwar era. It’s broadly residential, houses feel like they come from a postwar vintage, and on the whole it’s a lot like some of the outskirts of Rockford and other places I’ve been which date from a time where residential and commercial development tended to be kept separate.

Several blocks west of the brewery is Small Memorial Park, a little forested enclave on the edge of which is a little semi-municipal complex hosting the Kankakee County Museum and the Kankakee Civic Auditorium. The story of how the auditorium came to be is interesting - the Woman’s Club of Kankakee seems to have willed it into being in 1950 - and it’s the kind of story you just don’t hear about so much anymore.

The auditorium was the staging site, and essentially the finish line, for the 5K.

Every year the Morton Arboretum has this thing in January they call Pine Pacer. You sign up, you get a jacket, and you pledge to run or walk a certain number of miles in the month of January. I’ve signed up the last two years, gotten nice jackets, and wound up nowhere near the minimum pledge amount.

This time around I decided it was going to be different. I pledged 25 miles, and when the month was over, I’d put in 34.25 miles, all on the treadmill. After having run a dreadful race in December, I felt like I was ready to do well.

I actually have a whole lot more to write about January here, but I’m saving a chunk of it for the next installment, because I found I had so much to write about Kankakee!

The course went twice around the expanse of the park and the schools located on the back side of the park. The streets were only partially cordoned off, though, so we were relegated to the sides, and the roads were kind of old, and so there was a substantial camber for most of the route. (Roads usually have a camber - you want rainwater to run off the road to the sides and not pool in the middle! But this seemed like quite a bit more than usual.)

Race time was 1:00 and it was in the low 40s. I hedged on what to wear, thinking I’d run in shorts, but then deciding it was a little colder than that, so I had athletic pants on over my shorts, and a thin wicking jacket - one of my Pine Pacer jackets! - over a wicking shirt. I made one error, forgetting my thin gloves at home, which I would have worn.

The race started in one lane of a two lane street, and though we were chipped only the finish line had sensors. Based on the running I’d been doing over the course of January, I wanted to try and make a point of starting a little slower, gaining a little speed over the course of the first mile, trying to get to an ideal pace somewhere around the half-kilometer mark. At about the 1K mark I was at a point where I was very slowly gaining ground on a small pack about 25 feet ahead of me, who I estimated were running at about an 8:20 mile pace. But they were clearly going faster than that, because my app recorded my split mile at about 8:08, so I must have been sub-8 by the point I hit the mile mark.

I felt like I was doing pretty well, and thought I’d have a decent chance of breaking 27:00, but I was actually doing better than that. My second mile came in at 8:54, and then my third mile actually came in a little faster at 8:48. I crossed the finish like with the clock at 26:30 (and even that doesn’t account for the couple of early seconds it took from when I started to when I crossed the line.) The course was true, too, as I stopped the app pretty quickly after finishing, and it recorded the distance as 3.11 miles.

26:30 was my best race time since October 2017, and the fifth-fastest time I’d ever posted.

This was a fairly small race overall: 118 people, and I finished 37th, which was pretty good because there was an unusually large proportion of serious runners on hand. (I actually finished second in my bracket, which I didn’t even realize!) Many of the racers present had also been at the race I ran in Herscher two falls ago, and were part of the local Kankakee River Running Club. Their words here, not mine:

We've been running the Kankakee area since 1979 (and boy are our legs tired).

I suspect I’ll see some of the same people at some other races in the near future as well. I admit that the idea of a running club seems daunting to me - I think I kind of embrace the idea of the loneliness of the long distance runner - but I’m warming up to finding running groups. I can only hack the treadmill for so long.

When the race was over, how could I resist dropping in on the Kankakee County Historical Museum? It was literally right there!

The area surrounding the museum is a little weird. There’s a mid 19th century schoolhouse which has been moved to the site, and there’s a curious garden, complete with some kind of sculpture of collapsing columns (the picture at the top of this post.) I’m not sure what the overall statement there is supposed to be.

Inside the museum itself, in one large room there’s an ongoing exhibit devoted to the works of George Grey Barnard, a famed turn-of-the-last-century sculptor whose primary muse was that most famous of Illinoisans, Abraham Lincoln. The collection of busts and casts includes this extremely bizarre one called “Christ Lincoln”:

The whole exhibit overall was one of the strangest collections I’ve ever seen.

A couple rooms down was the local sports memorabilia room, which meant this was the place to see artifacts from the man himself, NBA Hall of Famer Jack Sikma:

Sikma famously graduated from Illinois Wesleyan (as did I), which is today a Division III school but at the time was NAIA, though not exactly fertile ground for NBA stars. Before he got to IWU, he was a star at St. Anne High School just east of Kankakee. After college, he spent 13 years wearing green for the Bucks and Supersonics. He is easily the most famous athlete from Kankakee County, and there’s a fair argument that he’s the most famous graduate of IWU.

I also learned that there are three Illinois governors from Kankakee. George Ryan (1999-2003) was of course the most recent, but I didn’t know about Samuel Shapiro (1968-1969) or Len Small (1921-1929). Small Memorial Park is named after Governor Small, and my favorite bit of trivia here is that Len isn’t short for what you might think. Len is in fact short for… Lennington.

Part of me wishes that all of these weird running excursions might terminate at the county historical museum, but then part of me thinks y’all are not really interested in this much detail, but then part of me says y’all are reading this far.

The race being over and my whirlwind trip through the history museum being over, I met Sapphira and learned about the travails and possibilities of Kankakee. Now, I’m not an expert in urban planning or economic development, but that hasn’t stopped me before and isn’t going to stop me now: When you have a place like this which needs a lot of help in a lot of different places, singular grand gestures are awesome, but you have really got to find a way to lift up communities block by block. And people in other places might think this sounds like Robin Hood stuff, but the core problem these communities have is that the wealth has been systematically siphoned away, and what they need is for money to be thoughtfully pumped back in.

I didn’t see as much of it as I saw in Belvidere last year, but I suspect the overall dilapidated state of the housing stock, especially in the core of the city, is a major impediment to any kind of thorough redevelopment. But you also want to avoid outright gentrification, where the existing residents are driven away. So you start with a combination of offering thoughtful renovation credits, especially in the direction of things like energy efficiency, while also facilitating some mechanism of rent and property tax control, so that you can help the people there build up in a way that solidifies the base while investing in local contractors but not also pricing people out.

How about this outside the box idea: If you’re going to dig up yards to replace ancient lead pipes, that’d be a pretty good time to put in a geothermal system. Finance the geothermal system by letting property owners “borrow” against their energy savings. Cities like Kankakee, if given the right combination of money and authorization, could pivot into administering such programs in very thoughtful ways, because it’s possible for the city government to know about the entire city and how different areas might be in need of slightly different services.

We are never going to move everybody into huge urban centers. Revitalizing regional hubs can serve as a way of stabilizing significant traditional population centers while also stabilizing the rural areas that they serve.

Communities thirsting for development can sometimes be places where seemingly mundane things are major causes for excitement. And so it was the week I visited Kankakee, as that was the week that Ricky Rockets opened:

Getting a large new clean colorful gas station to open at the Illinois Route 17 exit on the east side of town was something that took years to come together.

Dear friends, this is where I could write 83 pages about the phenomenon of the interstate highway coiling around an urban center, effectively replacing the highways that run through the middle, and in the process often displaying the outside revenue that helped sustain these oases in the corn. Alas, I’ve written enough. Allow me to merely suggest that if you find yourself in need of gas along I-57, Ricky Rockets is there, and the good people of Kankakee would welcome your business.

It seems that in an installment where I actually had a whole lot to say about the running itself, I simply had too much to say about Kankakee. And I actually missed saying this: the hazy IPA at Knack Brewing was very good, and while I don’t drink much beer these days, I hope to find myself back some time soon.

Our next installment will take us straight up U.S. 52, but I’ll have a lot more to say about the running. Unless the enormity of my next location overwhelms me…