For most of its history, Peoria built things that could only have been built here — Victorian mansions on the bluffs, a sandstone city hall once voted the best in the country, a hillside of mid-century modern homes designed by local architects.
But the buildings going up in the Peoria area lately tend to look the same — flat-roofed blocks of brick, metal panel, and glass — the kind of efficient, from-nowhere construction spreading across every mid-sized American city.
A new police headquarters in East Peoria. A county health campus on Sheridan Road. An apartment complex chosen, in part, because the developer had already built the same thing in other states.
It wasn't always like this.
Ed Barry, an architect at Farnsworth Group and immediate past board president of the Peoria Historical Society, has a theory about what changed. It starts with the company whose name was, for a century, synonymous with Peoria itself.
"Had they built the new headquarters that they designed in Downtown Peoria — oh my god, to me we'd be talking about a different city. Totally different city," he said.
He's speaking about Caterpillar — the construction equipment giant whose yellow machines and logo are recognizable on job sites and T-shirts worldwide — that was for nearly a century synonymous with Peoria.
Formed in 1925 by the merger of two California tractor companies, Caterpillar moved its headquarters to East Peoria in 1930 and grew into the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, a Fortune 100 company run from the banks of the Illinois River.
As late as 1982, the Washington Post's Thomas Edsall described Peoria as having been "a pocket of prosperity in the heartland of America, an island of productivity and well-being due to Caterpillar, a Pabst brewery, a Hiram Walker distillery and rich farmland."
That year, Caterpillar workers went on strike, Pabst closed its brewery, and Hiram Walker shut its distillery for good.
In the early 1990s, nearly one in four jobs in Peoria was in manufacturing. Today it is closer to one in eight.
Even during Peoria's worst stretches of layoffs and shuttered factories, top CAT executives lived here, shopped here, and raised their children here. Architectural historian Tim Hartneck, who volunteers for the Peoria Historical Society and maintains the Central Illinois Landmarks Foundation's architectural archive, said the Caterpillar era is what put modern day Peoria on the map.
"The '50s, '60s, maybe into the '70s — that's when Peoria stopped being a little river town and became a city. That's where we got the All-American City awards," said Hartneck.
Civic ambition was tied directly to the company. When CAT decided to build its world headquarters on Adams Street in the 1960s, "they weren't happy with the courthouse across the street," Hartneck said. "So they kind of pushed the county to build a new courthouse, and then that spurred other things going around down there."
And the company's leaders, Barry said, took the built environment personally in a way their successors don't.
"You don't find the current Caterpillar senior folks hiring an architect to design something special that has an art piece to it," Barry said. "Whereas I have stories of [architects] Cletis Foley and Gordon Tinsman and others who were hired by previous Caterpillar presidents to design a home for them."
The absence shows up beyond architecture.
"I think all not-for-profits are struggling a bit because all the senior leadership is in Frisco [Texas], or wherever," Barry said. "Yes, that has an impact. That absolutely has an impact."
The turning point came in February 2015. Then-CEO Doug Oberhelman stood alongside then-Gov. Bruce Rauner and announced that Caterpillar would stay in Peoria and build a new global headquarters downtown: three towers at the heart of a six-block, 31-acre riverfront campus, sized for more than 3,000 employees. Construction wouldn't begin, Oberhelman said, until economic conditions improved worldwide.
Construction never began.
Less than two years later, under the leadership of then-CEO Jim Umpleby, Caterpillar's senior executives moved to Deerfield, outside Chicago. In 2022, the headquarters moved again, to Irving, Texas.
Asked where the region's architecture is heading, Hartneck was blunt: "A lot of new construction I see is just pretty pedestrian."
Barry's fix?
"You need to go to Frisco and knock on the door of the new president, Joe Creed, and say, please come back. Please marry us again. We still love you," he quipped.
Since the departure, buildings meant to house young CAT interns sit abandoned downtown. While charming cafes line a block of Adams Street, and Water Street near the old Rock Island depot is great for food and pictures, walk a minute in any direction and you will find yourself surrounded by abandonment.
Empty buildings, empty storefronts, blankets, trash.
It looked different once, and there is film to prove it. Peoria: Pledged to Progress, a 20-minute promotional film produced by the City of Peoria and restored by Christopher Farris of the Peoria Public Library, captures the downtown of the 1960s from the rooftops.
Main Street was packed with cars bumper to bumper, sidewalks full of shoppers, the Bergner's sign presiding over a department store district that stretched for blocks, the Pabst brewery, the Caterpillar works with its name in raised letters running the length of a city block. The Murray Baker Bridge had just been dedicated. The new county courthouse was on its way.
Sixty years later, construction is happening again — in East Peoria, on Sheridan Road, in the Levee District. But the buildings going up would be unrecognizable to the people in that film.
For most of the last century, somebody in Peoria wanted its buildings to be special — and for most of that century, that somebody was Caterpillar. The question now is who, if anyone, will want it next.
"At the end of the day," Barry said, "all of us should try to think about the environments that we create, or that we have an influence over."
This is the second of two stories on architecture and development in the Peoria area. The first asked why the region's newest buildings feel the way they do — and what the science says they do to the people who pass by.
