The Time I Wrote About Dog Poop on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

 

The Time I Wrote About Dog Poop on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

In 2017, the Rockford Art Museum allowed me to spend two days writing children's poems directly onto its gallery walls.

All twenty-six of them.

This was not vandalism. I want to establish that immediately.

Nobody chased me down East State Street. The police were not summoned. The Rockford Art Museum knew exactly what I was doing. In fact, they supplied me with a large assortment of expensive art markers with which to do it.

What I'm less certain about is whether they had completely considered the implications of saying yes.

Because one of the poems was called “D is for Dog Poop.”

I wrote that one in brown.

Another was “U is for Urination.”

Yellow.

Welcome to the arts in Rockford, Illinois.

Bittersweet Observations

The occasion was Bittersweet Observations, a 2017 exhibition at the Rockford Art Museum that included work by my partner, artist Jenny Mathews. Jenny had been creating paintings and illustrations that revisited childhood stories and imagery, and our children's book Atrocious Poems A to Z fit naturally into the world of the exhibition.

Atrocious Poems A To Z

The book had been nearly eight years in the making. I wrote the poems and Jenny created the illustrations. Its premise was “poems about all the things kids love to hate”: bullies, vegetables, inoculations, sharing, monsters, liver, dog poop, and the other catastrophes adults dismiss because we've forgotten how enormous small problems can feel when you're a child.

The book was funny, but the idea underneath it wasn't entirely a joke. Children have anxieties adults frequently regard as trivial because adults know those things will pass. Children don't necessarily know that yet.

The kids who visited the museum seemed to understand the premise immediately.

Some adults needed a little more convincing.

I Had an Idea

The idea of writing all twenty-six poems directly onto the museum walls was mine.

I admired the Dadaists and Surrealists, and somewhere along the way I realized I had an unusual opportunity. If I could convince a respectable American art museum to let me write the poems directly onto its walls, I could quietly introduce a little Dada into an otherwise straight exhibition.

For children.

The Dadaists usually had the courtesy to announce they were doing Dada.

I didn't.

I proposed writing the poems on the walls. The museum said yes.

The gates were open.

Two Days on the Museum Wall

It sounded easier than it was.

The installation took two days. It was around 100 degrees outside and considerably colder inside the museum, where temperatures have to be maintained for the artwork.

Jenny's illustrations were displayed along the wall, and I wrote each corresponding poem beside them by hand. The museum had a wide selection of art markers because it also conducted art classes, so I tried to choose colors that complemented the individual illustrations while also making the entire wall work visually.

Sometimes this required aesthetic judgment.

Sometimes the poem was called “D is for Dog Poop.”

Brown.

I don't remember every color I used, but “O is for Orange” wasn't a particularly difficult decision either. And when I reached “U is for Urination,” there was really only one responsible choice.

Yellow.

There was no accompanying artist statement explaining that yellow represented the existential condition of childhood urination.

Pee is yellow.

The installation process became surprisingly physical. Writing an entire book vertically on a museum wall is hard on the hands and arms. I periodically did yoga on the gallery floor to loosen myself up. Other people were working around me because part of the larger installation involved constructing a small forest inside the museum, and I'd take breaks from writing to help with that.

I believe I made at least one mistake substantial enough that part of the wall had to be painted over so I could write it again.

Living with a visual artist had already taught me something useful.

Everything can be repainted.

The Kids Got It

One of my favorite memories of the exhibition is that children generally didn't require much explanation.

Adults sometimes seemed to need permission to understand what we were doing. Was a poem about stepping in dog poop really supposed to be hanging in an art museum? Was it serious? Was it a joke?

The answer was yes.

To an adult, stepping in dog poop is an annoyance. To a child, it can be the worst thing that has happened since Tuesday.

That's what the book was about.

Rockford children walked into the museum, saw the illustrations and poems, and generally understood the arrangement immediately.

Perhaps children are naturally better Dadaists.

The Part Where I Wasn't an Artist

There is one more absurd detail.

I specifically asked the Rockford Art Museum not to list me as one of the exhibiting artists.

At that point Jenny and I were involved in what felt like three to five public events every week. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted and couldn't find enough corners to hide in.

I wanted to do the work and skip the rest.

So there I was, spending two days physically writing twenty-six poems across an entire wall of the Rockford Art Museum, while insisting I wasn't one of the exhibiting artists.

There are photographs of me standing beneath the finished installation.

Photo by Ryan Davis

My name appears above me in enormous letters.

I didn't ask to be listed in the exhibition, but I did manage to get my misspelled name displayed across an entire museum wall.

That's difficult to improve upon.

From Byron to Rockford

There was another reason the installation meant something to me.

The ancestor of Atrocious Poems A to Z began when I was a fifth grader at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron. Our class was assigned to create a children's book. I procrastinated until two days before it was due and finally threw together an alphabet book called The Monster Dictionary.

My teacher gave me a B.

Her written assessment began:

“Not colored. Excellent ideas!”

She told me that if I'd put more effort into the project, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress.

A B for effort 

That bothered me for decades.

Eventually I met Jenny in Rockford, asked her to illustrate my new version of the alphabet-book idea, and we spent eight years finishing Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Then something happened that my fifth-grade teacher probably couldn't have predicted.

I took the descendant of that unfinished little alphabet book and wrote all twenty-six poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum.

And this time I colored it.

Dog poop was brown.

Pee was yellow.

After three months, Bittersweet Observations came down. The walls were painted over and another exhibition took its place. I believe the next one involved motorcycles.

That's what museums do. One Rockford story disappears and another takes its place.

But for three months in 2017, children could walk into the Rockford Art Museum and find a grown man had written a poem about dog poop on the wall in brown marker.

And nobody threw him out.

Rockford had given him permission.

Fifty Years of TWATS: The Surprisingly Long History of the Rockford Ravens Rugby Club

 Rockford has never had much trouble finding sports to call its own.

We had the Rockford Peaches. We have the IceHogs. We have the Ski Broncs building improbable human pyramids on the Rock River. We have golf courses, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, bowling alleys, and enough sports complexes that at some point somebody apparently decided our most renewable natural resource was athletic fields.

And for the last fifty years, we've also had rugby.

The Rockford Ravens Rugby Football Club was established in 1976, which means the Ravens are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026. That's half a century of Rockford men and women voluntarily running toward other large human beings without the benefit of shoulder pads, helmets, or the good sense to throw the ball forward.

That deserves some recognition.

How the Ravens Got Here

The early history has acquired a little bit of legend.

According to a 2016 history of the club, the Ravens were reportedly started by an Englishman who moved to the area in 1976. The club was originally associated with Oregon, Illinois, then Kishwaukee, before eventually settling permanently in Rockford.

Whatever the exact circumstances of its birth, the Rockford Ravens survived.

That's significant.

Sports teams come and go. Recreational leagues form, flourish for a few years, lose players, lose fields, lose organizers, and disappear. Maintaining any volunteer athletic organization for fifty years requires something considerably stronger than enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon exercise.

The Ravens developed a culture.

Today the club operates under the Forest City Rugby Union, a nonprofit organization, and includes men's, women's, and youth rugby. The men's and women's first sides compete at the Division III level.

Their home field is at Lyran Park on South Bend Road, where the Ravens also hold their annual Luck of the Draw rugby tournament.

But understanding the Ravens requires understanding something about rugby itself.

A Hooligan's Game Played by Gentlemen

American football has whistles.

Rugby seems to regard whistles mostly as irritating interruptions to what everyone came there to do.

Players run, kick, tackle, scrum and pass the ball across the field, with one particularly confusing rule for Americans: the ball cannot simply be thrown forward toward the goal line. Rugby players advance while passing laterally or backward, although they can kick the ball forward.

There are no helmets and no shoulder pads.

This occasionally produces exactly the results you would imagine.

But one of the fascinating things about rugby is the contrast between the violence of the game and the culture surrounding it. A 2016 interview with a Ravens captain used the old description of rugby as "a hooligan's game played by gentlemen."

That seems particularly appropriate here.

After spending a match tackling one another into the ground, rugby teams traditionally socialize together. The home team feeds the visitors. Players share drinks, tell stories, sing songs and generally behave as though the people attempting to flatten them an hour earlier are now old friends.

For the Ravens, that social tradition isn't incidental.

The club describes camaraderie as one of its greatest strengths. Former players don't necessarily disappear when their playing days end. They become officers, organizers and social members. The club holds picnics, parties, breakfasts and banquets and participates in charitable and community activities.

In other words, joining the Ravens has traditionally meant joining something larger than a team.

The Girls Brought Home a State Championship

The Ravens' history isn't merely longevity.

Rockford has also produced championship rugby.

According to Rugby Illinois records, the Rockford Ravens girls won the Illinois high school rugby championship in 2010, defeating Plainfield for the title.

That wasn't an isolated appearance near the top of Illinois rugby. Rockford returned to the championship match several times, finishing second in 2012 and 2015 and sharing a runner-up listing in 2013.

Rugby Illinois credits Rockford with four girls' state title-match appearances.

For a sport that still exists somewhere outside the consciousness of many local sports fans, Rockford rugby has quietly accumulated a respectable history.

Then There Are the TWATS

Eventually, playing rugby in Illinois apparently wasn't enough.

The Ravens also developed a tradition of international touring.

Every few years members travel overseas as the Wild American Touring Side.

Yes.

The acronym is TWATS.

I have checked this.

In 2022, sixty-two people representing ten different rugby clubs traveled across Scotland with the Ravens touring side. They played three matches, defeating Isle of Islay 12-7 and Moray 30-25 before losing to Lochaber 24-12.

They returned to Rockford with a winning international record of 2-1 and, presumably, several stories unsuitable for inclusion in a respectable local history blog.

The Scottish clubs also participated fully in rugby's social traditions. On Islay, the home club fed the entire traveling party after the match, and the visitors toured local distilleries. In Elgin, Moray Rugby Club presented the Americans with homemade haggis.

There are worse ways for a Rockford sports team to spend an afternoon.

Fifty Years and Still Running

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Rockford Ravens isn't a championship, a Scottish tour or even surviving fifty years.

It's that the basic idea still works.

The club continues to invite people who have never played rugby before to come out and learn. Its current men's, women's and youth programs keep alive something that began locally in 1976, when rugby was considerably more exotic to the average American than it is today.

There is something very Rockford about that persistence.

This city has always accumulated strange and wonderful institutions around its edges. Some become famous. Others simply keep doing what they do decade after decade until suddenly you look up and realize they've become part of the history of the place.

The Rockford Ravens are one of those institutions.

For fifty years they've practiced, traveled, competed, won championships, thrown parties, recruited newcomers, welcomed old players back, toured foreign countries and tackled one another into the grass.

The Peaches got a movie.

The IceHogs get an arena.

The Ski Broncs get the Rock River.

But somewhere in Rockford, there has been a rugby match going on since 1976.

Happy 50th anniversary to the Rockford Ravens.

Not bad for a bunch of TWATS.

 

The Lost Movie Theaters of Rockford, Illinois

When we think about Rockford's old movie theaters, three names tend to dominate the conversation: the Coronado Theatre, the Midway Theatre, and the Times Theatre.

There is a pretty good reason for that.

They're still here.

The Coronado remains one of Rockford's great architectural treasures. The Midway still stands on East State Street, its tower and marquee surviving despite decades of uncertainty. And the Times Theatre on North Main Street has been the subject of a long-running restoration effort.

But these weren't the only places Rockford residents went to the movies.

Not even close.

For much of the twentieth century, Rockford had a surprisingly large collection of movie houses scattered around downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. Most have disappeared so completely that it's difficult today to imagine a time when going to the movies in Rockford didn't mean driving out to a multiplex.

The Midway Theatre

The Midway is the oldest of Rockford's three most recognizable surviving movie houses.

It opened on August 3, 1918, at 721 East State Street. Architect J.E.O. Pridmore designed the Spanish Renaissance-style building, which included much more than a movie theater. The complex also contained storefronts, apartments and even a bowling alley in the basement.

The Midway was reportedly the largest theater in Illinois outside Chicago when it opened.

Its location also explains its name. At the time it was built, the theater stood roughly midway between Rockford's city limits.

For generations of Rockford residents, the Midway was simply part of the landscape of East State Street.

A devastating fire gutted much of the building in 1980, although the distinctive façade, marquee and tower survived. The building was restored and later became home to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra before the orchestra moved to the Coronado.

Today the Midway remains one of those Rockford buildings almost everyone recognizes, even if fewer and fewer people remember actually seeing a movie there.

The Coronado Theatre

If the Midway was impressive, the Coronado Theatre was designed to overwhelm you.

The Coronado opened on October 9, 1927, at 314 North Main Street. It cost approximately $1.5 million to build and seated about 2,400 people.

It wasn't merely a room containing a movie screen.

The Coronado was an atmospheric theater, designed to make audiences feel as though they had entered another world. Spanish castles, Italian villas, dragons and a ceiling resembling a star-filled night sky surrounded moviegoers. There was even a massive Barton pipe organ.

It quickly became known as "Rockford's Wonder Theatre."

Movies were only part of the attraction. Over the decades the Coronado hosted performers including Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., the Marx Brothers and George Gershwin.

Unlike so many of America's great movie palaces, the Coronado survived.

After an enormous community restoration effort around the turn of the twenty-first century, it emerged as the Coronado Performing Arts Center and remains one of the most spectacular buildings in Rockford.

The Times Theatre

The Times came slightly later.

Located at 226 North Main Street, the Times Theatre opened on March 30, 1938, with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Thoroughbreds Don't Cry.

Architecturally, it belonged to a different generation than the elaborate Coronado. The Times embraced the sleek curves and horizontal lines of Streamline Moderne, giving downtown Rockford a thoroughly modern movie theater for the late 1930s.

The theater had roughly 1,000 seats and remained a movie house for decades.

Its final film was The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey, when the Times closed in February 1983.

The building later became a restaurant, nightclub and entertainment venue before sitting vacant for years. More recently, preservation efforts have attempted to bring the Times back to life as an entertainment venue.

But even these three theaters tell only part of the story.

The State Theatre

One of the most significant Rockford theaters to disappear completely was the State Theatre at 105 West State Street.

Its history actually began as the Palm Theatre, which opened in 1913. After remodeling and a period of closure, it reopened as the State Theatre in September 1931.

The State wasn't trying to compete with the Coronado by being another gigantic fantasy palace. Its business model included showing major movies on their second runs at affordable prices.

Its slogan said it nicely:

"Good Shows at Reasonable Prices."

The State survived the Depression, World War II and the arrival of television, but it didn't survive downtown redevelopment.

It closed in September 1976 and was demolished later that year. The Luther Center apartment building eventually occupied the site.

Today there is virtually nothing there to suggest generations of Rockford residents once lined up at that location to see movies.

The Capitol Theatre

The Capitol Theatre, at 1122 South Main Street, was another substantial Rockford movie house.

Built in 1928 by Anthony Domino and Theodore Ingrassia, the approximately 1,000-seat Capitol was designed by Rockford architect Wybe J. van der Meer.

Like the Coronado, the Capitol was an atmospheric theater, although on a smaller scale. Its auditorium had a Spanish garden theme and a ceiling where artificial stars twinkled overhead. The building's Spanish Colonial exterior included a red tile roof and terra-cotta medallions depicting famous cultural figures.

The Capitol showed movies, hosted vaudeville performers and later became a venue for live music. Performers associated with the theater included Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

Eventually the movies stopped. The building subsequently served other purposes, including a billiard hall and restaurant, before falling vacant and deteriorating.

The auditorium was finally demolished in December 2025, although the historic South Main Street façade remained standing.

For nearly a century, however, the Capitol was another reminder that Rockford's movie theater history extended well beyond downtown.

And There Were More

This is where Rockford's theater history becomes wonderfully murky.

Old theater directories and historical records contain a remarkable collection of additional Rockford movie-house names: the Rex Theatre, Royal Theatre, Strand, Roxy, Auburn Theatre, Capri Theatre, Crest Theatre, Dreamland Theatre, Liberty Theatre, Lyric Theatre, Majestic Theater, Orpheum Theatre and Palace Theatre, among others.

Some of these names represented the same building at different times. Some operated relatively briefly. For others, fragments of information survive but not enough to reconstruct their stories without considerably more digging through old newspapers, city directories and theater-industry publications.

There were also later neighborhood and shopping-center theaters, including the Colonial Village Cinema, North Towne Cinemas and Northridge theaters, followed by the multiplex era familiar to more recent generations.

And Rockford had drive-ins, including the Belford, Robin and Sunset, which deserve their own place in the city's moviegoing memory.

The point isn't really to compile every theater that ever projected a movie in Rockford.

It's to remember how thoroughly movies were once woven into the physical fabric of the city.

People didn't necessarily travel across town to a giant complex containing twelve or twenty screens. There were theaters downtown. There were theaters in neighborhoods. There were grand movie palaces and modest second-run houses. There were places where you could spend an afternoon watching cartoons and places where simply walking through the lobby must have felt like entering another country.

Most of them disappeared.

The State is gone. The Capitol auditorium is gone. Many of the smaller theaters disappeared so thoroughly that their names now sound almost imaginary.

Dreamland. The Palace. The Majestic. The Lyric.

But the Coronado survived.

The Midway survived.

The Times survived.

And if you stand in front of any one of them long enough, it's worth remembering that these buildings aren't the remnants of three unusual theaters Rockford happened to have.

They're the survivors of an entire moviegoing city that has mostly vanished.

 

The Faust Hotel: When Rockford Had a Grand Hotel

Greetings from Rockford, Illinois.

For years I could look out my north window and see two of downtown Rockford's great survivors: the Midway Theatre and the Faust Hotel.

I found some old postcards of the Faust on eBay one day and was struck by something unusual about them. The building in the postcards was obviously from another Rockford — a city of grand hotels, ballrooms, visiting dignitaries and men who apparently packed suits to go bowling — but the building itself was still right there outside my window.

That is one of the peculiar things about the Faust. Rockford changed around it.

The Faust didn't go anywhere.

Rockford Builds a Skyscraper

The Faust Hotel opened in 1929 at 630 East State Street, an enormous undertaking for a city that was becoming one of the Midwest's important manufacturing centers.

Behind the project was Levin Faust, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in Rockford in 1887 and went to work as a machinist at W.F. & John Barnes Company. Faust became one of the city's successful industrialists and investors, helping organize or finance businesses including Mechanics Machine Company, Rockford Drop Forge, Rockford Tool Company, Rockford Milling Machine and Estwing Manufacturing. He also served as president of the Rockford Park District board.

Then he decided Rockford needed a hotel.

Not just a hotel.

A hotel.

The completed Faust towered over East State Street and became the city's premier lodging and social destination. It contained hundreds of guest rooms, restaurants, ballrooms and lounges.

And, yes, a bowling alley.

An eight-lane bowling alley, in fact.

This was apparently an era when civilization understood that no luxury hotel was truly complete unless a guest could finish dinner, attend a formal dance, drink several cocktails and then attempt to pick up a 7-10 split without ever leaving the building.

Unfortunately for Levin Faust, he picked possibly the worst year in American history to open an enormous luxury hotel.

1929. 
      

The Great Depression devastated the venture. Faust lost the hotel in bankruptcy in 1933 along with much of his fortune. He died three years later.

The hotel bearing his name survived him.

When Presidents Came to Rockford

For decades, if you were important and came to Rockford, there was a pretty good chance somebody was going to put you in the Faust.

Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed there.

John F. Kennedy visited the Faust during his 1960 presidential campaign.

Swedish royalty came through its doors, an especially significant event in a city whose history was so profoundly shaped by Swedish immigration. Prince Bertil of Sweden was guest of honor at a banquet there in 1938.

The Faust became more than someplace to sleep. It was where Rockford presented itself to the outside world.

This is easy to forget now.

We tend to look at old buildings as architecture. But buildings like the Faust were also stages. Weddings happened there. Business deals happened there. Conventions, banquets, dances, political events and celebrations happened there. People arrived in Rockford and formed part of their impression of the city inside that building.

For a substantial part of the twentieth century, the Faust was Rockford's living room.

The Postcards

One of my favorite old postcards shows the Faust lobby.

The funny thing is that when I used to walk past it almost every day, I always thought it looked remarkably similar.

I have occasionally wondered whether it might actually be the same carpet.

This is Rockford, so I am unwilling to rule that out without further investigation.

Other postcards show the lounges and public rooms during the hotel's glory years, when downtown Rockford was crowded with theaters, department stores, restaurants and hotels.

Just down East State stood the Midway Theatre. The Coronado was on the other side of downtown. The Register Star's tower rose beside the river. At night the Faust itself announced its presence in enormous illuminated letters high above the street.

The building wasn't merely located in downtown Rockford.

It helped define what downtown Rockford looked like.

Did JFK Bowl at the Faust?

This brings us to the important historical questions.

There really was a bowling alley inside the Faust.

John F. Kennedy really was at the Faust.

Therefore, it is technically possible that John F. Kennedy bowled at the Faust Hotel.

I have uncovered absolutely no evidence that this occurred.

It also seems unlikely that bowling would have ranked especially high among the entertainment opportunities available to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Still, until someone produces documentary evidence establishing his whereabouts during every minute of his Rockford visit, I prefer to consider the matter unresolved.

Rockford historians deserve mysteries too.

From the Faust to Tebala Towers

The age of the grand downtown hotel eventually ended.

In 1973 the building was purchased by Rockford's Tebala Shriners and became known as Tebala Towers. Later in the decade, the former hotel was converted into apartments.

Eventually its old name returned.

Today it is the Faust Landmark, a residential building rather than a hotel.

But the old hotel is still visible everywhere once you know what you're looking at.

The building still dominates East State Street. Its brick and terra-cotta exterior still rises above downtown. And more than ninety years after it opened, the Faust remains one of the most immediately recognizable structures in Rockford.

In fact, despite generations of predictions about Rockford's future, nobody has managed to build anything taller.

The Light at the Top of the Faust

Years ago, while I was still living where I could see the Faust from my window, I noticed something one night.

A light was on in one of the uppermost rooms.

I had never seen it illuminated before.

Naturally, I imagined that some super-secret ancient society sworn to protect Rockford had convened an emergency meeting at the top of the Faust.

Perhaps they had been meeting there since 1929.

Industrialists. Newspaper publishers. Politicians. Swedish royalty. Phantom Regiment elders. Possibly a Sock Monkey representative.

They would assemble only when the city faced its greatest dangers.

The only problem was that I couldn't think of anyone currently in Rockford who would be summoned to such a meeting.

So it was probably maintenance.

But I prefer my version.

Because the Faust has earned a little mythology.

It has watched Rockford celebrate and struggle for nearly a century. It survived the Depression that destroyed the fortune of the man who built it. It watched presidents arrive and businesses disappear. It watched downtown empty out and begin filling up again. It watched theaters close, factories vanish and generations of Rockfordians come and go beneath its windows.

And it's still there.

The old postcards aren't really pictures of a vanished building.

They're pictures of a vanished Rockford surrounding a building that refused to vanish.

Right here in downtown Rockford, Illinois.

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

Rockford’s Symbol: Enduring Art or a Giant Red Boondoggle?

There are certain things a Rockford artist eventually learns are expected of them. Sooner or later, somebody is going to suggest a sock monkey. A screw is always available. The Rockford Peaches remain eternally on deck. And looming over all of it, quite literally, is The Symbol.

You know The Symbol. Everybody in Rockford knows The Symbol, even if quite a few people couldn't tell you what it is supposed to symbolize.

Officially titled Symbol, the enormous sculpture standing near the Rock River was created by Russian-born American sculptor Alexander Liberman, one of the major figures in 20th-century American monumental sculpture. Constructed from massive steel cylinders painted bright red, the work has become one of Rockford's most recognizable landmarks.

But Rockford's relationship with it has never been quite that simple.

When Symbol arrived in the 1970s, it immediately became something Rockford excels at producing: an argument.

To supporters, it was exactly the sort of ambitious public artwork a city like Rockford should have. Here was a monumental sculpture by an internationally recognized artist, placed prominently along the river and impossible to mistake for anything else. Rockford wasn't merely decorating a park. It was participating in contemporary art on a scale usually associated with much larger cities.

To critics, it was a collection of giant red pipes.

And expensive ones.

That disagreement has followed Symbol for decades. Depending on whom you ask, it is an important example of modern public sculpture, an enduring Rockford landmark, an incomprehensible pile of industrial tubing, or evidence that somebody somewhere had access to public money and very persuasive presentation materials.

Which may be precisely why it has succeeded.

Public art that everyone immediately agrees is pleasant tends to become invisible. A tasteful statue sits in a park. People walk past it. Nobody argues about it at the dinner table thirty years later.

Rockford has been arguing about Symbol for roughly half a century.

Liberman's work makes particular sense in an industrial city. His monumental sculptures frequently used cylinders, beams and other fabricated steel forms, transforming the vocabulary of factories and heavy industry into abstraction. In Rockford—a city whose identity was built around manufacturing, machinery and metalworking—the material doesn't exactly feel foreign.

It looks manufactured because it is.

It looks industrial because it is.

And it looks a little like somebody dropped the contents of a gigantic machine shop beside the Rock River because, well, this is Rockford.

Over time, however, something happened that neither the sculpture's defenders nor its detractors could completely control. Symbol stopped merely being a controversial piece of public art and became The Symbol.

The capitalization almost feels necessary.

It became part of the city's visual shorthand. Photograph Rockford long enough and eventually The Symbol appears. Design something intended to announce ROCKFORD and somebody will suggest putting The Symbol in it. Along with the sock monkey, the screw and the Rockford Peaches, it entered that small collection of images Rockford continually uses to explain itself to itself.

That doesn't mean everybody suddenly decided they liked it.

That's the interesting part.

A landmark doesn't necessarily require affection. It requires recognition. The Eiffel Tower was despised by prominent artists when it was built. Plenty of cities contain monuments their residents spent years mocking before eventually becoming fiercely protective of them. Familiarity does strange things to public art. Yesterday's monstrosity becomes today's landmark and tomorrow's irreplaceable piece of civic identity.

Imagine someone announcing tomorrow that The Symbol was going to be removed permanently.

People who have spent forty years calling it ugly would probably be among the first to complain.

Because after all this time, the question isn't really whether Symbol is beautiful.

The better question is whether Rockford would feel slightly less like Rockford without it.

Rockford Symbol

I think it would.

And maybe that's the final verdict on the old argument about whether The Symbol was a boondoggle or enduring art.

A boondoggle disappears when the money is gone.

Art hangs around long enough for everybody to argue about what it means.

Nearly fifty years later, those giant red pipes are still standing beside the Rock River, and Rockford is still arguing.

That sounds suspiciously like art.

 

Der Rathskeller: 88 Years of German Food on Auburn Street

For generations of Rockford residents, you hardly needed to give directions to Der Rathskeller. You just said 1132 Auburn Street.

Der Rathskeller opened there in 1931, when Fred Goetz, a Wisconsin native of German descent, established a sausage shop and delicatessen on Rockford's North End. What began as a small neighborhood business grew into one of Rockford's longest-running and most recognizable restaurants, serving German food from the same Auburn Street location for 88 years.

The menu became part of the institution: sausages, sauerkraut, schnitzel, German potatoes, sandwiches and beer. By 2010, local tourism materials were still describing Der Rathskeller as a Rockford favorite where "German ancestry" showed through in both its lunch sandwiches and traditional family-style German dinners.

The Rathskeller Rockford. Ya, ya, ya. 

But Der Rathskeller was one of those Rockford places where the building, atmosphere and accumulated memories mattered almost as much as the food.

For roughly four decades, the restaurant was owned by former Rockford schoolteacher and principal Betty Giesen. Under Giesen, Der Rathskeller became firmly embedded in North End life. She added the restaurant's outdoor beer garden in 2009, creating another feature that would become closely identified with the place. When Giesen retired in 2016, her son Mike DuPre took over and operated Der Rathskeller for another three years.

And then there was the commercial.

For decades, Rockford radio listeners heard a polka-backed Der Rathskeller jingle performed in an exaggerated German accent by local radio engineer Chuck Ingle. The advertisement became so familiar that generations of Rockfordians could probably have recited the address without ever looking it up:

1132 Auburn Street.

And, inevitably:

Yah, yah, yah.

The commercial became one of those peculiar bits of shared Rockford culture — something meaningless to almost anyone from somewhere else but instantly recognizable to people who grew up here.

Like many old Rockford institutions, Der Rathskeller even accumulated a ghost story. Tales circulated that founder Fred Goetz occasionally returned to keep an eye on things in the basement. Whether Goetz ever actually punched in for the supernatural night shift is another question, but a restaurant doesn't stay in the same place for nearly nine decades without acquiring a few stories.

The original Der Rathskeller closed in December 2019 after 88 years in business. There was hope that the closing wouldn't be permanent, and new owners purchased the property the following spring. After extensive renovations, the restaurant reopened in October 2020 as Rathskeller Rockford.

The timing could hardly have been worse.

Opening a restaurant during the COVID-19 pandemic proved an uphill battle, and the revived Rathskeller closed in October 2021, just one year and 13 days after reopening. The Auburn Street building then sat vacant for more than three years.

But 1132 Auburn Street wasn't finished being a restaurant.

In 2024, the property was purchased by Barbara and Claudio Pennacchi. Their daughter Lia Pennacchi and her husband, chef Chase Williams, transformed the historic space into Plume, an upscale-casual restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Northern Italy, particularly the traditions of Emilia-Romagna, where the Pennacchi family has roots. Plume opened June 19, 2024.

Plume

The cuisine changed from German to Italian, but the new owners didn't try to erase what had come before them. Original Der Rathskeller artifacts, including an old liquor license and menu, were preserved as part of the building's story. The old beer garden became Plume's patio and spritz bar.

That's probably a fitting fate for one of Rockford's great restaurant addresses.

Restaurants disappear. Menus change. Owners retire. Signs come down. The places that survive longest aren't necessarily preserved exactly as they were.

Sometimes the building survives because somebody finds another reason for people to gather there.

More than 90 years after Fred Goetz opened his sausage shop and delicatessen, people are still going out for dinner at 1132 Auburn Street.

The food is Italian now.

But Rockford still knows the address.

 

The Rockford Files: The Tunnels Beneath the City

There are tunnels under Rockford. That’s the easy part. What they were for, where they go, and what might have happened inside them is where things get a little more Rockford.

For generations, stories have circulated about passages beneath the city. Ask enough longtime residents and eventually somebody will tell you about a tunnel beneath an old factory, school, hospital, downtown building, or seemingly ordinary basement. Some versions of the story are perfectly mundane. Others involve bootleggers, gangsters, the Underground Railroad, Cold War fallout shelters, secret entrances, and passages connecting buildings that nobody remembers ever being connected.

Tunnels and Trolls, anyone?

The interesting thing about Rockford’s underground legends is that, unlike many urban legends, they begin with something unquestionably real. There actually are tunnels beneath parts of Rockford. From there, however, the case file gets considerably thicker.

The Official Explanation

Rockford spent much of its history as a heavily industrial city. Enormous factories and complexes required steam, electricity, water, communications, and other services, and underground utility passages were a practical way to move some of those services between buildings. Rob Wilhelmi, a Brownfields Redevelopment Specialist for the City of Rockford, has publicly discussed being inside some of Rockford’s underground spaces and identified at least some of them as utility tunnels.

That explanation should probably solve the mystery. A tunnel connecting two old industrial buildings doesn't require bootleggers, secret societies, or supernatural intervention. It requires pipes.

But this is Rockford, and "there were pipes down there" was never going to be the version people remembered.

File #1: The Prohibition Tunnels

Rockford was not exactly an innocent little Midwestern village during Prohibition. Gambling, bootlegging and other illicit enterprises existed here just as they did throughout northern Illinois, so stories that underground passages might have been useful for moving liquor or people aren't inherently absurd.

Over the years, stories have attached themselves to various downtown basements and underground passages. In some versions, liquor traveled through them. In others, they allowed people to enter or leave establishments without being observed. Inevitably, the name Al Capone sometimes appears.

This last development should always trigger the historian's warning light. Across the Midwest, approximately every third mysterious basement built before 1935 eventually becomes an Al Capone hideout. An old tunnel plus Prohibition does not automatically equal Capone.

Still, secondary use of an existing utility or service passage during Prohibition is entirely plausible. Plausible and proven, however, are two different things. For now, much of the Prohibition tunnel story belongs in the file marked UNCONFIRMED.

File #2: The Underground Railroad

Another persistent category of Rockford tunnel story involves the Underground Railroad. This one deserves particular caution because Rockford and northern Illinois have genuine connections to abolitionism, making the stories sound immediately believable.

The problem is that Underground Railroad folklore has attached itself to old houses, cellars and tunnels throughout the Midwest. A strange room beneath an old building becomes a hiding place. A sealed doorway becomes an escape route. A tunnel becomes evidence that enslaved people passed through it on their journey north.

Sometimes documentary evidence supports those claims. Sometimes family histories provide credible clues. Other times somebody discovers a peculiar hole in a basement and Harriet Tubman gets involved by Tuesday.

Without documentation connecting a particular Rockford passage to Underground Railroad activity, the responsible conclusion is that the story is possible but unproven. The actual history of abolitionism is interesting enough without turning every nineteenth-century cellar into a secret station.

File #3: The Fallout Shelters

The Cold War added an entirely new underground layer to American life. Fallout shelter signs appeared on buildings. Civil-defense officials considered basements and other protected spaces potential refuges from radioactive fallout. Children practiced drills while adults contemplated the cheerful possibility that civilization might end before dinner.

Rockford participated in that culture like virtually every other American city. Underground areas beneath schools, public buildings, factories and other large structures naturally became associated with civil defense. Memories of those places survive, but memories also mutate.

A basement designated as a fallout shelter becomes a bunker. A bunker becomes a tunnel. A tunnel becomes part of a network. Give the story another thirty years and somebody can walk underground from one side of Rockford to the other without ever seeing daylight.

Which brings us to the big one.

File #4: The Secret City Beneath Rockford

This is the grand unified theory of Rockford tunnels: somewhere beneath the streets is an enormous interconnected system linking downtown buildings, factories, theaters, schools and government facilities. Depending on who's telling the story, the tunnels may extend for miles. Some are supposedly large enough for vehicles. Others allegedly cross beneath streets or even approach the Rock River.

The evidence for one giant interconnected underground Rockford is considerably less impressive than the stories about it. But this is exactly how urban folklore develops.

Imagine a real tunnel connecting Factory A and Factory B. Factory B has another service passage. A nearby building has a large basement. Three blocks away is an old fallout shelter. Someone's grandfather remembers walking through one of the tunnels in 1958. Somebody else's uncle remembers an entrance that was sealed during demolition in 1974.

Now add Prohibition. Add gangsters. Add eighty years.

Congratulations. Rockford has an underground city.

The exaggeration doesn't necessarily mean the people telling these stories are lying. Human beings connect fragments. Memories merge with things we've heard from other people. Buildings disappear, leaving behind stories that can no longer easily be checked. Eventually nobody remembers whether Grandpa actually walked through the tunnel or merely told a story about somebody who did.

The Truth Is Down There

And that's what makes the tunnels such a good Rockford mystery. Beneath all the embellishment is a physical reality. Rockford really did build underground infrastructure. Some passages survived long enough for modern people to enter them. Others presumably disappeared when factories were demolished, streets reconstructed and buildings redeveloped.

What happened inside every one of those spaces during the last century is another question entirely. A utility tunnel built for steam pipes doesn't stop being a utility tunnel because somebody once carried a case of illegal whiskey through it. Buildings acquire unofficial uses. People take shortcuts. Teenagers explore places they aren't supposed to explore. Employees discover doors and stairways that don't appear on the public tour.

That leaves enough uncertainty for the stories to survive.

Somewhere in Rockford, somebody still knows about a door in a basement. Somebody's father went through it once. Somebody remembers a tunnel being sealed. Somebody knows somebody who could supposedly show you where the entrance used to be.

And that's usually where the story ends.

For anyone tempted to conduct their own investigation, don't. Surviving underground industrial spaces can be private property and may contain asbestos, unstable structures, contaminated materials, standing water, electrical hazards and other considerably less romantic remnants of Rockford's industrial past. Trespassing through an abandoned tunnel is a poor way to discover that the most dangerous thing lurking beneath Rockford isn't paranormal at all.

So for now, the tunnels can keep some of their secrets. The documented passages belong to Rockford history. The bootleggers, hidden escape routes and vast subterranean networks remain somewhere between memory and folklore.

And somewhere beneath our feet, perhaps behind a bricked-over doorway nobody has opened in fifty years, there's probably another story waiting to be found.

THE ROCKFORD FILE REMAINS OPEN.