Aurora Audio Tour: Legends, Landmarks, and the Golden River Era

On your right rises a tan brick high-rise with a narrow rectangular shaft, long vertical window bands, and a stepped crown that makes it easy to spot above Stolp Island.

Leland Tower is Aurora deciding that modesty could take the day off. In nineteen twenty-six, the Aurora Building Corporation announced a hotel project so bold it would change the skyline, and Herbert P. Heiss of the First Illinois Company secured the site to make it real. Then H. G. Christman Company took the contract, and architects Anker Sveere Graven and Arthur Guy Mayger gave the city a full twenty-two-story statement piece. For a while, this was the tallest building in Illinois outside Chicago... which is a pretty confident thing to say in brick and steel.

Its name even arrived dressed for the spotlight. At first, newspapers called the project The Illinois, but then it shifted to the Aurora-Leland, borrowing some industrial sparkle from Henry Leland, the auto executive who launched the Lincoln Motor Company in nineteen seventeen. Before the doors even opened, the tower had already learned how to make an entrance.

And wow, Aurora gave it one. On the eighth of February, nineteen twenty-eight, the Leland Hotel opened with fireworks and a crowd packed in to watch. This place is where Aurora leaned into civic spectacle and public showmanship. The rooftop Sky Club turned that instinct into architecture: dinner, dancing, elaborate decor, and views that let the city admire itself while being admired right back.

Take a second and let your eyes travel all the way up that facade... what kind of city dream decides it needs twenty-two stories? If you want a stronger sense of its vertical swagger, check the west-side photo in the app; you can really feel the upward pull there.

The guest list became part of local lore: Sammy Davis Junior, Gene Autry, Kim Novak, Eddie Albert. People loved to whisper that Al Capone stayed here too, though researcher Tracy Duran later found stronger evidence that he probably never did. That tells you something important: even the rumors wanted to be glamorous. Gene Autry’s story is the real gem anyway. Before he became a star on W-L-S Barn Dance, he performed country-western programs right here.

Then the Sky Club pulled off another surprise. In nineteen thirty-seven and nineteen thirty-eight, more than three hundred twenty recordings were cut here for Bluebird and R-C-A Victor, including John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Yank Rachell, Washboard Sam, and Robert Lee McCoy. After the hotel years faded in the nineteen sixties, the tower reinvented itself again as part of Aurora’s broadcasting network for W-L-X-T, W-A-U-R, and briefly W-M-R-O-F-M. If you glance at the east-side image, you can see the solid mass that carried all those identities.

By the time you leave this corner for Stolp Island, about a two-minute walk from here, you’ve hit the moment when Aurora stopped simply raising buildings and started staging itself. If you’re checking access information, posted hours are generally Monday through Friday from nine to five, Saturday from ten to three, and closed Sunday.

On your left, Stolp Island shows up as a slim strip of brick and stone buildings packed into a narrow shape between two branches of the Fox River, with Leland Tower rising as the island’s unmistakable vertical marker.

For something so small, this place carried a huge job. Stolp Island covers only about zero point zero three square miles, but Aurora kept loading it with the things that were supposed to belong to everyone.

That started with Joseph Stolp. He spent twenty-one days traveling to Chicago, then walked to Aurora and first saw the village on the twelfth of June, eighteen thirty-seven. Within days, he was living on this island, on land his uncle had secured for him, and he was already cutting timber for a mill that went into operation that same year. In eighteen forty-eight, he formally bought the island for twelve dollars and seventy-two cents, roughly five hundred dollars today, and he turned that modest foothold into one of Aurora’s first engines of growth.

A dam finished in eighteen thirty-five had already given the river a purpose here. Stolp, working with partners including Zaphna Lake and the McCarty brothers, used that force to run a mill. Then, in eighteen forty-nine, he raised a serious brick woolen factory and kept expanding it until as many as one hundred fifty workers were making wool cloth and woolen goods here. The river gave the island power... and reminded everyone who was boss. In February of eighteen eighty-seven, a flood destroyed the original McCarty Mill.

But Stolp did more than make things. He gave land for Aurora’s original city hall, for the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall, and for the first Young Men’s Christian Association, or Y-M-C-A. He also helped launch the Aurora Silver Plate Manufacturing Company and the First National Bank of Aurora. If you want a face for the name, take a glance at the portrait in the app. He looks like a practical man, and that fits. His real monument is not one statue. It’s this whole island.

The Fox River split Aurora into east and west, and that divide created real rivalry. East Aurora incorporated in eighteen forty-five. West Aurora followed in eighteen fifty-four. When the two cities joined in eighteen fifty-seven, the charter came with a condition: the new city hall had to stand here, right between them. So in eighteen sixty-five, city leaders planted city hall on Stolp Island, with a post office on the first floor. Smart move. Nobody could claim the center if the center sat in the middle of the river.

If you check the aerial view on your screen, you can see the trick. The Fox River and Stolp Island corridor formed a hinge, a narrow civic seam stitching both halves of Aurora together. That’s why veterans’ halls, libraries, stores, theaters, clubs, and hotels kept gathering here. In the nineteen twenties, the city even filled and reinforced the flood-prone north end, literally reshaping the island for bigger ambitions.

So this little island became Aurora’s shared stage: industry first, then public life, then culture, commerce, and memory layered right on top.

In about a minute, we’ll meet one of the clearest examples of that idea at Grand Army of the Republic Hall.

On your right is a compact octagonal hall of pale limestone, capped by a steep roof and marked by an old cannon out front beside the small entry lot.

This place looks modest... but Aurora loaded it with some of its biggest civic hopes. The Grand Army of the Republic Hall opened on the fourth of July, eighteen seventy-eight, and that date was no accident. Local residents raised the money, Joseph Stolp donated the land, and together they created a building that honored Union veterans while serving the whole city.

That choice of site mattered. Stolp Island sat between Aurora’s east and west sides, and people treated it as neutral ground when those two halves of town got touchy with each other. So planting a memorial here meant more than convenience; it said public memory belonged in a shared center, not on one side’s turf. Along this Fox River corridor, geography kept shaping identity, and this hall turned that awkward middle ground into common ground.

The story started in eighteen sixty-nine, when the Soldier’s Monument Association began raising funds for a Civil War monument. Then Fred O. White, the group’s secretary, came back from Foxborough, Massachusetts, with a sharper idea. He had seen Memorial Hall there and thought Aurora needed not just a tribute, but a useful building... a place for meetings, books, and civic life. Architect Joseph Mulvey designed it in a Gothic Revival style, which means pointed, medieval-inspired forms meant to feel solemn and uplifting. Builders kept the basic Foxborough model, though they skipped the granite roof and stained glass.

Here’s the part most people walking by never guess: this veterans’ hall also became Aurora’s first public library, holding more than five thousand five hundred volumes. That is a serious shelf count for a building many folks assume did only one job. Until the Carnegie library opened across the street in nineteen oh-three, this was Aurora’s only public library.

Aurora’s Grand Army of the Republic Post Number Twenty met here for decades. Its last surviving member, Daniel Augustus Wedge, died in nineteen forty-seven on his one hundred and sixth birthday, and with him, Aurora’s living link to the Civil War finally slipped away. Then even the building nearly vanished. In the early nineteen sixties, city leaders wanted parking. Public protest, and especially pressure from Korean War veterans, kept the wrecking ball away. That saved not just stone and wood, but the idea behind them.

Restoration came in fits and starts, then surged after twenty eleven. Crews stabilized the structure, repaired the masonry, restored floors, stairs, and woodwork, and added modern utilities so it could reopen in twenty sixteen as a museum again.

If you want to come back inside, the museum is generally open Wednesday through Friday from noon to four, and Saturday from ten to three. When you’re ready, head toward the Stolp Woolen Mill Store... just about a minute away, where Aurora’s working life put on its public face.

On your left, look for a narrow brick storefront with a glassy ground floor, a second-story oriel window that juts outward, and a small palmette ornament crowning the gable.

This little building tells a very practical story... and practical stories are where cities really reveal themselves. Joseph G. Stolp put this store here around eighteen sixty to eighteen sixty-one, after his wool business had outgrown its earlier setup. Before the brick mill, before the storefront, before any real sense of permanence, he worked from a tiny frame office on Stolp Island in eighteen thirty-seven. That matters, because it means the Stolp operation did not begin as some grand industrial kingdom. It began small, close to the ground, with a person trying to make something useful and sell it.

And this store was the key move. The mill to the west produced wool goods, but not everything went out across the country. Some of it came here, right to the street, where ordinary customers could see what Aurora made with its own hands. That is how local commerce started becoming civic power: goods moved from workshop to storefront, and a private business began shaping neighborhood habits, daily errands, even the identity of the island itself. A factory hidden from view can make money. A store like this makes a presence.

If you peek at the image in the app, the upper facade shows off that projecting oriel window - a window bay that extends from the wall - with a shallow cornice above it and a decorated center panel. At the top, that palmette detail, a carved leaf-like ornament, gives the whole thing a little flourish. Down at street level, the storefront has modern wood and glass, but the basic design still follows the shape created by Stolp’s eighteen eighty-nine renovation.

There’s some grit in the story, too. The island stayed tied to the Stolp family through the mill’s ups and downs. But railroad expansion brought fierce competition, and Joseph had to close the mill in eighteen eighty-seven. The store survived anyway. C. C. Hinckley and Company moved in with watchmaking tools. J. D. Rice and Sons used it for painting and decoration. Joseph even renovated the interior and added an extension on the east in eighteen eighty-nine, refusing to let the address go quiet.

That stubborn survival is why you’re looking at the oldest building still standing on Stolp Island, later recognized by the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-three and folded into the historic district three years after that.

And here’s the next turn in Aurora’s story: once money and trade settle in, people start building clubs, lodges, and social circles to match. Head on toward Aurora Elks Lodge Number seven hundred five, about a one-minute walk from here. If you ever want practical details, the building’s posted hours are generally Monday through Friday from nine to five, Saturday from ten to three, and closed Sunday.

Look for a broad, flat-roofed brick building with horizontal bands of red-brown twisted brick and beige terra-cotta, marked by carved Mayan-style faces and glyphs across the facade.

Now this place... it’s Aurora dressing up for a big night out. The Aurora Elks Lodge Number seven oh five opened in nineteen twenty-six as the second home for a fraternal order that had organized here in nineteen oh one. Fraternal and social clubs mattered in cities like this. They were part networking machine, part celebration hall, part public ranking system... a place where people joined, hosted, toasted, and showed they belonged.

Zimmerman, Saxe and Zimmerman, a Chicago firm, gave the Elks something way beyond a plain meeting house. They built a steel-framed, concrete-reinforced clubhouse in two rectangular sections, one three stories, one four. Inside, the whole thing unfolded like a social engine: lobby, meeting rooms, offices, ballroom, bars, lounge, dining rooms... and in the taller section, forty-six rooms for traveling members, plus a kitchen and a basement bowling alley. Half lodge, half hotel, half recreation palace.

Pause for a second and study the facade. Does this feel like a typical Midwestern clubhouse... or like Aurora trying on a grander, stranger mask? If you want the details up close, check the glyph ornament on your screen.

Here’s the local angle most people miss: this dramatic Mayan look was reportedly not the first plan. The architects started more conventionally, then pivoted when the nineteen twenties fell hard for newly publicized discoveries in Mesoamerica. William Carbys Zimmerman even reportedly visited Late Classic Maya sites himself, and you can see that influence in the deities, symbols, and placements worked into what is otherwise a Prairie School building - that low, horizontal style tied to the Midwest. It’s a rare mash-up, and honestly, a pretty swaggering one.

The lodge dedicated this building on the seventeenth of November, nineteen twenty-six, and with around seven hundred members then - later swelling to fifteen hundred with a waiting list - the opening became civic theater. Since nineteen seventy-eight, people here had already been treating it like something worth saving, and after its nineteen eighty National Register listing, it eventually found another life as apartments and a restaurant.

Next, we leave a building made for membership and performance, and head toward Old Second National Bank, where Aurora tried to make permanence look solid enough for everyone to trust. If you’re checking access, this property is generally listed as open daily from nine to five.

On your left, look for the low building of long, thin Roman brick on a pink granite base, capped by a red-tile peaked roof and marked by a row of tall brick piers rising like sentries.

This is Old Second National Bank, and it plays a very confident little trick. Prairie School design usually spreads out low and wide, hugging the ground, but George Grant Elmslie, designing here in nineteen twenty-four near the end of his career, pushed that style upward. So instead of pure horizontals, you get a bank that stands up straight... polite, composed, and just a touch theatrical.

That mood came straight from William George, the bank president who led Old Second from eighteen ninety-five to nineteen thirty-three. He wanted a building that would grow old with grace and still announce that Aurora meant business. Not just a storefront for money... a public performance of steadiness.

Elmslie didn’t do it alone. He brought in sculptors Emil Settler and Kristian Schneider, plus muralist John Warner Norton. On the south side, the ornament gathers most densely, and the narrow terra-cotta trim - baked clay shaped into decoration - follows the gable like a careful signature. If you check the image in the app, you can catch those details more clearly.

And here’s the sly part: this bank was never only about deposits and ledgers. It held a two-hundred-seat auditorium in the basement, offices on the third floor, and a private club on the fourth and fifth floors. In other words, local business had grown up. It wanted finance, status, meetings, speeches, and a place to mingle after the counters closed.

Even after later interior changes, Norton’s three-panel mural of Aurora in the eighteen thirties stayed on the north wall, keeping the city’s origin story inside a modern bank. In nineteen eighty, architects restored the building and added a north office wing so it could keep serving the city, not freeze into a monument. Then around two thousand, crews repaired damaged terra cotta piece by piece, proving William George’s gamble might actually work.

And now, from money trying to look permanent, we slide into an older downtown art: welcoming travelers. The Galena Hotel is right here. If you want to return later, the bank generally keeps weekday hours from nine to five, a short Saturday morning schedule, and closes on Sunday.

On your right, look for a tall brick rectangle with four stacked stories, limestone trim, and a top floor that still carries the clearest trace of the original hotel.

This place began as the Fox River House in eighteen fifty-seven, when A. N. and G. Pierce set a hotel here along the Galena to Chicago trail. Before Aurora showed off banks and towers, it was already a crossroads town, and this address sat right in the stream of it. Stagecoaches rolled through with travelers, salesmen, news, and business from across the Fox River valley. So the hotel did more than offer a bed... it worked like part of the transportation network itself.

And here comes one of Aurora’s oldest patterns: fire, loss, and rebuilding. In eighteen sixty, a fire destroyed the first hotel. The lot stayed empty until eighteen sixty-two, when E. D. Huntoon bought it and started over. He rebuilt for a city that had grown even busier with milling and manufacturing, and he ran the place for twenty-six years.

What I love is that people remembered Huntoon’s hotel as an important local gathering place, not just a stop for strangers. Picture that mix for a second: stagecoach passengers on the move, townspeople lingering, business deals, gossip, politics, and river-valley chatter all under one roof. Aurora’s social life had a heartbeat long before its grandest architecture arrived.

If you glance at the image in the app, you can see that sturdy, squared-off presence still hanging on. The brick and limestone came from local kilns and quarries. Only the fourth floor still matches the original design most closely, but the exterior has changed surprisingly little.

The building kept reinventing itself: Huntoon’s successors renamed it the Northwestern Hotel in eighteen eighty-eight, then the Grand Hotel in nineteen oh seven. The Koummoutseas family bought it in nineteen sixty-one and gave it the name Galena Hotel. In nineteen seventy-six, it joined the National Register of Historic Places. Even now, it is part of an active preservation project, with the city sorting out what belongs to the historic story and what came later.

When you’re ready, head toward the Hobbs Building... about a two-minute walk from here.

On your right, look for a four-story red-brick corner building with rounded-arch windows, stacked bay windows, and a five-sided turret crowned by an onion-shaped dome.

This place started as business... but Aurora turned it into theater. Albert Hobbs, a furniture dealer, undertaker, and civic leader, opened this building in eighteen ninety-five. His family had already been in that trade since at least the eighteen sixties, and Albert started helping out when he was just fifteen. Back then, that combination made perfect sense: the same shop might sell you a parlor chair, a bedstead, a coffin, and the funeral service too. Ordinary commerce, sure... but never really ordinary.

Architect James E. Minott gave Hobbs a building with swagger. He used Richardsonian Romanesque, a hefty style with big round arches and a sense of weight, then mixed in some Queen Anne playfulness through the bays and that dramatic corner turret. Builder Levi Hull Waterhouse, one of Aurora’s great brick men, turned the design into a real downtown performer. Notice the decorative brickwork, the limestone trim, and the ornamental terra cotta. This building knows how to hold a pose.

And then Aurora pushed it from stylish to unforgettable. In the nineteen ten Fourth of July celebration, a man jumped from the top of the dome into a six-foot pool of water below. Yep. A furniture-and-funeral building became a stunt platform. That’s about as pure a piece of civic showmanship as you’ll find.

If you want the before-and-after miracle, check the image on your screen: that restored dome is a replica, brought back after years of decline and a major renovation. After Albert died in nineteen twenty-six, the family era ended. The building sold at auction in nineteen twenty-nine for fifty-five thousand dollars, about a million in today’s money, changed hands again, and later sat vacant. The city removed the failing dome in twenty sixteen, but J-H Real Estate rescued the place in twenty nineteen, restored its storefronts and windows, rebuilt the copper cornice, and welcomed residents in twenty twenty-two. The National Register finally recognized that fight in twenty twenty-one.

From this public-facing showpiece, we’re heading toward something quieter: the William Tanner House Museum, about a ten-minute walk away, where Aurora’s story shifts from storefront ambition to early home life and the city’s first mapped identity.

On your right, look for a two-story brick house with a cross-shaped massing, tall Italianate proportions, and an octagonal cupola rising from the center like a small lookout.

This is the William Tanner House Museum, and it starts with a man who helped imagine Aurora before most of it even had lines on paper. William A. Tanner arrived in eighteen thirty-five, one of the city’s earliest settlers, and he wore more than one hat: surveyor, farmer, and later a hardware merchant whose business lasted until nineteen seventy-nine, longer than any other in town. He did not just make a living here... he helped map out how Aurora would grow. Streets, lots, neighborhoods - those practical marks of a surveyor’s hand quietly shape the lives that come after.

Tanner first worked land on the west side of the river, then went back to New York in eighteen thirty-nine to marry Anna Plum Makepeace. They returned the next year, raised ten children, and eventually outgrew simpler quarters. So in eighteen fifty-seven, Tanner put up this house, a confident Italianate home - that style loved height, symmetry, and a little drama. The plan forms a Latin cross, meaning the rooms branch from a longer central axis, and that cupola above the roofline crowns the whole place like a thought made visible.

If you check the image in the app, you can get a clean look at how composed the exterior feels, almost formal, but still deeply domestic. Inside, the first floor held the parlor, music room, kitchen, dining room, library, and even the main bedroom and bath. Upstairs belonged to the children and family sleeping rooms. It is easy to talk about city-building in terms of mills, banks, and big public buildings, but some of it begins in rooms like these, where accounts were kept, letters were written, and futures were planned around a family table.

The Tanner descendants stayed here until nineteen thirty-six, when two of the children gave the house to the Aurora Historical Society. After that, the place kept changing its role. First it served as a local-history museum, and later curators leaned into its identity as an upper-middle-class Victorian home, so what visitors see now is both preservation and careful historical staging. During the shutdown years, staff even created a video tour that revealed hidden layers most visitors never see - basement art restoration, ornate plasterwork, the bells, and the cupola, which is normally closed.

One of the most intimate surviving objects is almost startlingly personal: a daughter made artwork from twists of hair from each of the Tanner children. Suddenly history is not abstract anymore. It is touch, memory, family.

So here is the question this house leaves hanging: if you were helping draw a young city into being, would you care more about where the streets ran... or about the private lives those streets might shelter?

From here, the story grows grander at the Col. Ira C. Copley Mansion, about a fifteen-minute walk away, where family success expands into public influence. If you want to return for a tour, the museum is generally open Wednesdays and Sundays from one to three.

On your right, look for a three-story Roman-brick mansion shaped like an L, with a white Ionic porch wrapping around it and an elliptical fanlight over the front door.

This house feels like Aurora reaching full stride. Colonel Ira Clifton Copley didn’t arrive as an outsider showing off; he came to Aurora with his family in eighteen sixty-seven, went to local schools, studied at Jennings Seminary, and spent a lifetime turning local opportunity into real power. First he made his money in gas and electric service, then he switched tracks and bought the Aurora Beacon-News in nineteen oh five. That paper became the seed of the Copley Press empire, formally organized in nineteen twenty-eight, and along the way Copley also served in the U-S House of Representatives.

Architect Jarvis Hunt gave him a house that could carry all that weight. Finished in nineteen seventeen, it mixes Classical Revival grandeur with Federal-style finesse. That means big public gestures and crisp early-American detail: a porch with Ionic columns, the kind with curled capitals at the top, slim pilasters framing the entrance, and a fanlight, that half-oval window above the door, catching extra light. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see how the mansion presents itself almost like a civic building in domestic clothes.

Here’s the detail locals love to slip in... the family story didn’t end in politics or newspapers. Copley adopted William N. Copley in nineteen twenty-one, and that boy grew up here before heading to California. He kept the family name, but his life swerved into painting, writing, collecting, gallery work, and Surrealist art. So this mansion, for all its authority, also launched a wildly different creative future.

Copley even reached beyond Aurora in stranger ways. Not bad for a man who started in utilities.

And that’s the sweep of Aurora, isn’t it? Mills, hotels, lodges, banks, houses... together they tell a city forever remaking ambition into identity, then handing the story forward. You can visit this exterior anytime, since the site is accessible around the clock.