Joliet Prison Tour Schedule Unveiled

JOLIET, IL - In roughly three weeks, the Joliet Area Historical Museum plans to start hosting guided tours of the grounds made famous by The Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The museum will be busing tourists from downtown's Route 66 museum on North Ottawa Street over to the prison on Collins Street before bringing them back. Tours inside the prison property will last about ninety minutes, according to Greg Peerbolte, the museum's executive director.

To get started, the museum aims to offer two daily tours on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and increase that to three daily tours in September and October. Peerbolte stressed that the museum already draws a substantial amount of traffic during the early part of the week from national and international travelers visiting Joliet from Chicago as part of their Route 66 adventure.

Tentatively, admission tickets to tour the Old Joliet Prison will cost $20, but there is a discount for Joliet residents and museum members, Peerbolte said. The Joliet Prison tours will continue through the end of October and then pick back up next spring.

On Tuesday night, July 17, the Joliet City Council is expected to approve a $50,000 marketing expenditure that will come from the city's reserve funds. The city memo indicates that other comparable facilities in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Jefferson City, Mansfield, Ohio and others across the world including London and Dublin "are highly visible and well-trafficked tourist attractions which fuel economic development in their respective areas."

Last Friday, Peerbolte spoke with Joliet Patch to give readers a snapshot of the upcoming prison ground tours and what to expect. Old Joliet Prison dates back to 1858, before Abraham Lincoln became president. It closed around 2004, the city council memo states.

"We're planning to begin here at the museum in our visitor center," Peerbolte said of the upcoming tours. "We have parking here, we're close by Metra, Amtrak, so we'll do a shuttle from our museum facility up Collins Street, which is about a three-and-a-half mile, five-minute drive.

"We'll kind of wind around the building and the wall ... This is how the inmates were brought in as prisoners. They would come in through the west sally port or the west gate.

"We're hoping to give glimpses of the laundry facility, then you have the chapel, we'll walk down along the school building and the cell houses ...we'll go back out and walk up to the tower here, tower one, turn around."

From there, the tour groups will visit the north segregation unit, the building that has the famous "It's Never Too Late! To Mend" sign that became legendary in the Blues Brothers movie.

"We're anticipating first floor access in that building as well as there's an original cell from the old cell houses that we'll set up over in the courtyard so they'll get a look at that," Peerbolte said.

Eventually, after touring near some of the prison's ruined buildings, the ones damaged by arson fires in recent years, the tour group will board the bus again and head to the administration building "to let people photograph that iconic structure."

Museum officials are in the process of setting up a prison cell door in the grassy area so tourists can photograph themselves standing behind bars with the limestone fortress as the background.

"About an hour and a half (tour), that's right," Peerbolte said. "And a lot to see. The initial feedback we've gotten is, this is a pretty substantive tour so we're excited to begin to offer that."

Meanwhile, the museum and Joliet Chamber Of Commerce are gearing up for a major fund-raiser gala. It's an event to pay for future building restoration efforts at the Old Joliet Prison grounds. The August 25 event is called The Great Joliet Prison Break In.

Between 500 and 600 tickets have already been sold, Peerbolte told the city council at Monday night's pre-council meeting. The Joliet Chamber has decided to cap the attendance at 3,000 tickets. The party on the prison grounds will include Blues Brothers and Johnny Cash tribute bands as well as several food vendors and drinks.

RELATED: Great Joliet Prison Break In Tickets Now On Sale

Images via John Ferak/Joliet Patch