How nice to see construction cranes instead of wrecking balls around the Illinois State Armory. Having kvetched for years about its neglect by the owners, I feel obligated to say a few words in praise of the project that is restoring it to health.
As alert citizens know from these pages, the Armory, now in its 80s, is leaving the circuses and rock bands and trade shows behind and soon will be settling into much more sedate old age as a State of Illinois office building. Armory 2.0 will house as many as 700 employees left homeless by the renovation of the Capitol’s north wing across the street and the planned demolition of the Stratton Office Building.
Stabilization work having been completed in 2024, workers are now doing the fun part – raising the roof to add a full sixth floor with skylights that will allow in natural light and turn that gloomy old auditorium into an atrium. (Start your betting pools now for when the first leak is reported.) There’s even talk of including a “satellite” visitors center to go with the one that opened in 1988 on Spring Street across from the Capitol. Pretty soon every public building in Springfield will have a visitors center; look for a proposal to build a visitors center to direct visitors to the visitor center they want to go to.
Bet they don’t have one of those in Madison.
The new Armory should emerge from its cocoon by early 2028, maybe sooner. Of course, every time a janitor replaces a toilet paper roll in a Stratton Building restroom complaints of “extravagance!” fill the air. So we Serious People of the press must at least ask about the project’s larger public benefits. A new office building might be what the state wants, but is it the best use of that particular building? Various experts saw in it a potential visitors center or a new Illinois State Museum; nervous sorts will ask if it is prudent for state government to rid itself of an armory when we have an insurrectionist in the White House who already has targeted Illinois as enemy territory. In these pages I suggested it might make a food court and commons for visitors and state workers, maybe even a museum of state government featuring a Hall of Smoke and Mirrors. Alas, columnists carry as little weight around the Statehouse as Luxembourg at the UN.
Is a new office building really needed? It wasn’t that long ago that local landlords were weeping because state workforce cuts had all but emptied Springfield’s fine collection of leftover furniture stores and assembly plants and strip mall emporia of tenants. Today however we have a governor who is trying to restore to health a state workforce crippled since the start of the millennium by cheapskates and ideologues. And power-adjacent office space for staff for the guv and lawmakers is always in short supply.
Is it wise for the state to build space for more humans when more and more future work seems likely to be done at home, if indeed it will be done by humans at all? Probably. State workers have been put out of business several times already by cutting-edge technologies such as typewriters and copy machines and desktop PCs; my guess is that in the 1950s one stenographer was laid off for every gallon of Liquid Paper purchased by the state. But it will take decades for state government to catch up with the AI revolution, if it actually happens. Until then, state government’s version of Parkinson’s Law will always pertain: “Work expands so as to fill the office space available for it.”
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just build new? Not in terms of energy expended. As for the cost in money, the new Armory will be an “executive” office building. The new penthouse level will have skyboxes, in effect, where agency boards can think lofty thoughts while looking down on everybody else, as boards like to do. Building them will add to the expected cost of $160 million. That’s roughly $640 per foot, which is on the high end of the average cost of new Class A office buildings in downtown Chicago. But low-cost buildings are seldom bargains, as the Stratton Building reminds us. Reuse also will spare the state having to demolish a nearly square-block building that’s built like a bunker. Best of all, we’uns will get a handsome old building to look at that will remain handsome for another half-century plus the pleasure of not having to look at the unhandsome building that probably would have replaced it. Worth $166 mill right there.
Mr. Krohe grew up in Springfield, and a lot of the best parts of his growing up were done in the Armory.
This article appears in April 2-8, 2026.
