Peoria

“Will it play in Peoria?” is a phrase we’d both heard for years without ever quite knowing where it came from, so arriving in the actual city felt oddly like meeting a celebrity’s hometown. Lia and I found a place built in tiers up from the Illinois River — warehouses and rail lines down by the water, then the older brick core of downtown, then the bluffs above lined with grand old houses that once belonged to distillery and manufacturing barons. Peoria’s fortunes rose on whiskey and heavy equipment, and the fingerprints of both industries are still visible if you know where to look.

The riverfront and Grandview Drive

The Illinois River is wide and slow-moving here, and the redeveloped riverfront has turned what used to be industrial land into a walkable stretch of parks, a small marina, and the RiverPlex recreation center where locals run at dusk with the water going gold beside them. We drove Grandview Drive along the northern bluffs at sunset, a route Theodore Roosevelt once reportedly called “the world’s most beautiful drive,” and while that claim asks a lot of a single Midwestern road, the view over the river valley and the twin bridges below made a strong case for it. Below the bluffs, Caterpillar’s massive visitor center traces the company’s rise from a Peoria tractor works to a global industrial giant, its lobby dominated by house-sized yellow mining trucks.

Bradley Park and the old neighborhoods

Away from the river, Peoria’s older neighborhoods surprised us — the Uplands and Moss Avenue historic districts are lined with turn-of-the-century mansions built during the city’s whiskey-distilling boom, when Peoria briefly produced more liquor than anywhere else in the country. We wandered Bradley Park’s ravines and stone bridges, built by the same Bradley family whose name now belongs to the university across the street, and stopped for lunch near the Bradley Park neighborhood’s small strip of local restaurants, where the conversation at the next table was, fittingly, about a new product being test-marketed in town.

Getting There

Peoria sits about two and a half hours southwest of Chicago and roughly ninety minutes north of Springfield, connected to both by Interstate 74. General Wayne A. Downing Peoria International Airport offers direct flights to Chicago and a handful of other regional hubs, making it a reasonably easy add-on to a broader Midwest itinerary. Downtown and the riverfront are walkable once you arrive, though a car is useful for reaching the bluff-top neighborhoods and parks.