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.

 

Needs More Sock Monkey: Rockford’s Accidental Icon

An inside joke among Rockford creatives is “Needs more sock monkey.” Because all work involving Rockford must apparently have The Symbol, a sock monkey, a screw, or the Rockford Peaches in it.

The sock monkey, at least, has earned the right to keep showing up.

Rockford’s connection to the familiar brown-and-white sock monkey begins with the Nelson Knitting Company, founded in Rockford in the late nineteenth century. The company manufactured work socks, eventually producing the distinctive Rockford Red Heel sock—the brown sock with the unmistakable red heel that would become the raw material for generations of homemade monkeys.

Needs more Sock Monkey!

The socks weren't originally toys. They were sturdy workwear, made for people who needed socks that could survive factories, farms, workshops, and long days on their feet. But somewhere along the way, people began turning worn or spare pairs into stuffed animals.

And the sock monkey was born.

Exactly who made the first sock monkey is difficult to establish. Homemade stuffed animals made from socks existed in various forms, and the idea developed through folk craft rather than through a single inventor sitting down and designing a commercial toy. What Rockford supplied was the sock that gave the most famous version its face.

That red heel changed everything.

Turn a Rockford Red Heel sock inside out, cut it, sew it and stuff it, and the red heel becomes the monkey's wonderfully oversized mouth. The sock's contrasting areas naturally lend themselves to the hands, feet and other features. The material itself practically suggests what it wants to become.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Nelson Knitting Company recognized what people were doing with its socks and began promoting the connection. Instructions for making sock monkeys were eventually included with packages of Rockford Red Heel socks, helping turn a regional homemade craft into an American folk-art tradition.

The company itself changed hands over the years, but the Rockford Red Heel sock survived. Today the socks are associated with the Fox River Mills brand, while the monkey they inspired has long since escaped the package.

Sock monkeys became children's toys, craft projects, collectibles, souvenirs and eventually nostalgia objects. There are antique sock monkeys and handmade sock monkeys, miniature monkeys and enormous monkeys. People have dressed them as brides, bikers, baseball players, soldiers, superheroes and probably every other occupation or character somebody could figure out how to fit into a pair of tiny pants.

Rockford, naturally, embraced the connection.

The sock monkey has become one of those peculiar local symbols that makes almost no sense until you know the story. It isn't a monument to an industrial titan or a famous battle. It's the descendant of a pair of work socks made in an industrial Midwestern city and transformed at kitchen tables into something funny and affectionate.

Which may actually make it a better symbol of Rockford than some of the official ones.

Rockford spent generations making things. Screws, machine tools, furniture, socks and countless other products came out of its factories. Most disappeared into the ordinary machinery of American life without anyone thinking much about where they came from.

One of those products grew ears, a tail and a big red mouth.

More than a century later, it's still hanging around.

And if you're designing something about Rockford and can't figure out what's missing, don't worry.

Somebody will tell you.

Needs more sock monkey.

 

How Rockford Became the Screw City

Of all the nicknames Rockford has accumulated over the years, none has quite the personality of Screw City.

It sounds like a joke now. It wasn't.

For much of the twentieth century, Rockford was one of America's great manufacturing centers for screws, bolts, nuts, fasteners and the machinery used to make them. The industry became so important here that Rockford eventually proclaimed itself the “Screw Capital of the World.”

But the story of Screw City actually begins with something completely different: furniture.

Welcome to Screw City

From Furniture City to Screw City

Beginning in the nineteenth century, large numbers of Swedish immigrants settled in Rockford, many bringing woodworking and metalworking skills with them. Those craftsmen helped turn Rockford into one of the country's leading furniture-manufacturing centers.

By the 1880s, Rockford had become a major furniture producer.

And furniture factories needed things.

Hinges. Locks. Cabinet hardware. Nails. Screws.

Instead of importing everything from somewhere else, Rockford entrepreneurs increasingly began making those things here.

That helped create an industrial ecosystem in which one Rockford factory supplied another. Furniture manufacturing encouraged hardware manufacturing. Hardware manufacturing encouraged metalworking. Metalworking encouraged machine-tool manufacturing.

The city became very good at making things that made other things.

National Lock and the Rise of Fasteners

One important step came with the development of National Lock Company in the early twentieth century.

National Lock manufactured locks, hinges and other hardware and eventually became one of Rockford's major employers. By 1950, the company employed more than 2,000 people.

Then came companies devoted even more directly to fasteners.

Rockford Screw Products was organized around 1930 by former National Lock associates. It began modestly, reportedly with just 15 customers, but expanded rapidly as it developed specialized screws and fasteners for industries such as automobile manufacturing.

Rockford was no longer simply making screws for furniture.

It was making fasteners for America.

Then Came the War

World War II transformed Rockford manufacturing.

The enormous demand for aircraft, tanks, vehicles, weapons and machinery created an equally enormous demand for the humble pieces holding all those machines together.

Screws.

Bolts.

Fasteners.

Rockford already possessed the factories, machine tools, skilled machinists and industrial knowledge to produce them.

Companies such as Camcar and Rockford Screw Products became important parts of wartime manufacturing. Rockford Screw Products became a major producer of aircraft bolts, while the city's larger network of machine shops and manufacturers supplied components needed throughout American industry.

By the 1940s, Rockford was being called the Screw Capital of the World.

For once, civic boasting wasn't much of an exaggeration.

Billions of Them

After the war, Rockford's fastener industry didn't disappear.

America entered a massive period of automobile production, housing construction and industrial expansion. All of it required hardware.

Rockford factories responded by producing screws, nuts, bolts and specialized fasteners by the millions—and eventually billions—for manufacturers around the country and the world.

By mid-century, manufacturing dominated the local economy. Generations of Rockford families went to work in factories producing machine tools, automotive components, cabinet hardware, aircraft parts and fasteners.

The city's identity became inseparable from manufacturing.

Screw City stuck.

More Than a Funny Nickname

Beginning in the 1970s and especially during the industrial upheavals of the 1980s, Rockford lost a substantial portion of the manufacturing economy that had created Screw City.

Factories closed. Companies moved. Employment declined.

But the nickname survived.

And perhaps that's because Screw City came to mean something slightly larger than screws.

It describes the Rockford that knew how to make things.

The city of machinists, toolmakers, engineers, factory workers and small manufacturers. A place where one company made furniture, another made the hardware for the furniture, another built the machines that made the hardware, and somebody down the street figured out how to make all of it faster.

Today you can still find Screw City on shirts, sports uniforms, businesses and signs around Rockford.

Sometimes it's used affectionately. Sometimes ironically. And occasionally someone unfamiliar with Rockford hears it and wonders exactly what kind of town they've wandered into.

But the explanation is wonderfully straightforward.

For decades, if something somewhere in America needed to be held together, there was a pretty good chance Rockford made the thing that held it together.

That's why we're the Screw City.

 

Uncle Nick's: Rockford's Late-Night Tradition

Long before gyros were common in northern Illinois, a man known simply as Uncle Nick brought Greek food to Rockford. After arriving in the city in 1974, he opened the first Uncle Nick's restaurant in 1980 with the goal of serving fresh, high-quality Greek food quickly and affordably. More than four decades later, the family-owned business remains one of Rockford's most recognizable local restaurants.

But Uncle Nick's is more than its history—it's part of Rockford's culture.

Uncle Nick's Rockford

For generations of Rockfordians, the downtown location has been the place you found yourself after midnight. Whether you were leaving a concert, working second shift, celebrating with friends, or just craving a gyro at 2 a.m., there was comfort in knowing Uncle Nick's lights would still be on. Standing at the pickup window, waiting for your order with a handful of strangers, became a small but familiar Rockford ritual.

Ask longtime residents about the city's unofficial signature sandwich, and many will answer without hesitation: the Uncle Nick's gyro. The restaurant has become one of those rare local institutions that people measure their lives against—remembering first dates, late-night adventures, and decades of conversations over fries and tzatziki.

Some businesses become landmarks because of their buildings.

Others become landmarks because of the memories people carry away from them.

Uncle Nick's has been doing both since 1980.

 

The Story of Rockford’s Sinnissippi Park: A Century of Beauty, Art, and Community

Long before Rockford became known as a center of industry and innovation, the Rock River was already shaping the identity of the city. One of the most treasured places along that river is Sinnissippi Park, a historic landscape that has served generations of residents as a place for recreation, reflection, and community gatherings.

Sinnissippi Park

The story of Sinnissippi Park began in the late 19th century, when Rockford leaders and residents began investing in public parks as the city grew. In 1875, the land that would become part of the park system was acquired, and over time the area was transformed from riverfront land into one of Rockford’s most recognizable public spaces.

The park’s name comes from the Native American term “Sinnissippi,” often translated as “rocky waters,” a reference to the Rock River. The river had long been central to the region’s history, from Indigenous communities who lived along its banks to the industries that powered Rockford’s growth.

One of the park’s most famous landmarks is the Sinnissippi Gardens, developed in the early 20th century. The gardens became known for their carefully designed landscapes, colorful plant displays, and peaceful walking paths. Over the decades, the gardens have remained a favorite destination for residents and visitors.

Another important part of Sinnissippi Park’s history is the Nicholas Conservatory and Gardens, located along the riverfront. While the current conservatory opened in 2011, it continues a long tradition of public horticulture in the area, connecting modern visitors with Rockford’s historic appreciation for gardens and natural spaces.

The park is also home to the historic Sinnissippi Band Shell, which has hosted concerts and community events for many years. Built in 1950, the band shell became a gathering place where generations of Rockford residents enjoyed music and summer evenings together.

Sinnissippi Park’s history reflects the broader story of Rockford itself: a city built by people who valued creativity, community, and connection to the natural landscape. More than a century after its creation, the park remains a reminder that preserving public spaces helps preserve the memories and traditions of a community.

Today, visitors walking through Sinnissippi Park are experiencing more than beautiful scenery — they are walking through a living chapter of Rockford history.