Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a longer story about Downtown Peoria when it was a commercial powerhouse in the 1950s and ’60s.
In November 1975, a Journal Star columnist recalled Downtown Peoria’s postwar and midcentury heyday.
“This was the place to be, the only place,” Jerry Klein wrote in a front-page article. “There were crowds downtown until late at night. There were drug stores and candy shops and places where the high school kids bought malteds and ice cream. There were little taverns in the alleys and winking signs at night.”
Klein waxed nostalgic about the “mighty” Block and Kuhl store and its Toyland, which was “probably the closest a kid could come in those days to realizing what heaven might be like.” He recalled the store’s “richly furnished” Skyline Restaurant and its “spectacular view over the river.”
Klein lamented the loss of the downtown Kmart, Hamilton Store and Walgreens over the course of the 1960s and into the ’70s — closures that coincided in part with the opening of Northwoods Mall in 1973. He mourned the former movie theaters, the pool halls and the restaurants. The article concludes:
“There were people here. There was excitement. There were traffic jams. … There was graft and corruption and people laughed when you mentioned Peoria. But that downtown was something.
“Now even in the mornings that sense of purpose, that busy and thrumming sound that once vibrated here, is gone, faded to a whisper. … At night the sidewalks are empty. There are grass and weeds in the cracks along Main Street.
“Where did all the people go? Will they ever come back again? When?”
When that story was published in 1975 — as now — the state of downtown was an ongoing concern. But its glory days can hardly be overstated.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: The glory days of Downtown Peoria
Reporting by Dean Muellerleile, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
