Joliet Beach Club

Has Joliet become an outdoor swimming desert?

Splash Station Waterpark, which won’t open for the fourth year in a row, is not the first outdoor swim spot in Joliet to close, as any longtime resident will tell you.

I personally remember four outdoor swimming holes: the Joliet Beach Club, the pool up on the hill at Highland Park and Nowell Park pool (all of Joliet’s East side) as well as Inwood Park pool at Inwood Recreation Center, on Joliet’s West side.

[ Memories of the former Joliet Beach Club ]

Other folks also remember an outdoor pool at Heggie Field, also on Joliet’s east side.

A 2003 Herald-News story said the Joliet Park District opened the Highland Park and Heggie Field pools in 1960.

I’m not sure when the Heggie Field pool closed. But the pool in Highland Park was open until at least 1974. For that was the summer my mother let me finally swim in it.

My family and I had moved to Joliet in 1963. We lived Belmont Avenue, practically in walking district to the Highland Park pool and near the old Boy Scout cabin, also gone.

The area near Highland Park pool also had tennis courts (I took lessons the summer of 1974), two playgrounds and an old dance hall that St. Bernard Catholic School, also gone, used for concessions at its annual all-school picnic.

My architect father recalled the hall. He said it was a simple building: a slab, metal roof and exposed beams.

[ Before Frisbee golf, Highland Park in Joliet had a much different look ]

Highland Park now has a disc golf course. But the beautiful area on top of the hill at Highland Park is now nothing but a hill.

Here’s how dismal Joliet’s pool situation was by 2018: The Joliet Park District was looking at pools…