Jamin Furniture Service

109-year-old oak doors at Joliet high school restored

Five layers of paint were removed

By Mary Owen/TribLocal.com reporter

 

Mary Owen/TribLocal.com Jamin Ortiz, whose company restored the oak doors, points to where the high school was expanded in 1924.

Some of the first students of Joliet Central High School in 1901 used the same front door as today’s students. The ornate, original oak doors have seen a lot of wear and tear, including five coats of paint – blue, green, yellow, beige and finally the current brown.

But on Friday, the four original front doors, which have been in a Chicago restoration workshop for the last five weeks, were re-hinged and again look as grand as they did in 1901.

“These doors are so rare,” said Jamin Ortiz, whose wood and furniture restoration company did the work. “They don’t make doors like this anymore.”

The project cost about $39,000, which also included restoration of a wood and glass arch above the four doors, and was paid for with donations from the Joliet Township High School alumni. The group is planning to continue the restoration work on the remaining 41 oak exterior doors – a project that could cost $350,000, according to the alumni group.

Joliet Township High School, now called Joliet Central, was built in 1901 and was designed by respected Joliet architect Frank S. Allen. The limestone structure, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is on Jefferson Street just east of downtown Joliet and the Silver Cross Stadium. The building was expanded in 1924 and at least twice after that.

Ortiz, who has been doing restoration work for 30 years, said school officials came to him with not much information about how the doors looked originally. But Ortiz quickly found his answers in halls of the school, where black-and-white pictures dating back to the 1920s hang in glass cases. 

In those pictures, Ortiz was able to see the doors’ hardware was in fact brass beneath all the coats of paint.

 “We couldn’t believe it,” said Ortiz, whose crew stripped the paint off the brass, then sandblasted them and finally polished them until they were a shiny golden color, revealing the school’s seal pressed into brass.

 The crew removed the doors and painstakingly hand-stripped the paint, repairing any damaged wood in the trim. When they were constructed, the doors were probably varnished annually with a cocktail of coffee, honey and alcohol, Ortiz said. The practice was later replaced with polyurethane.

 But it was those five layers of paint, including one layer with traces of lead, that protected the doors from decades of weathering. The paint also kept termites at bay.

 “They didn’t know that by painting it they were accidentally preserving it,” Ortiz said.