Louis Joliet Mall Rises from the Farm Fields
Stand at the corner of Route 30 and Mall Loop Drive today, and it is easy to forget what was there before. Fields. Open land. Gravel roads.
In the late 1970s, this stretch of Will County west of downtown Joliet was the kind of place people drove through rather than to. That was about to change – and not by accident.
The mall was built by Homart Development Company, the real estate arm of Sears. Getting the project into Joliet took real work…