As Naperville celebrated its 175th anniversary, the late Mayor George Pradel used his 2006 State of the City address to salute its pioneers, founders and the families that provided “generations of leadership.”
One such family, the Beidelmans, and their furniture business have helped shape the city’s fabric. Their store is considered the longest continuously operating furniture business in Illinois.
The family cites that legacy in pursuing a local landmark designation for their downtown buildings. Beidelman Furniture is in a three-story, red brick edifice built in 1928 for Oliver Beidelman, one of the founders of the local YMCA. His great-granddaughter, Katelyn Heitmanek, represents the fifth generation of the family to run the corner store at Jackson Avenue and Washington Street.
Katelyn Heitmanek and her mom Lana Heitmanek carry on the family business, Beidelman Furniture, in downtown Naperville.
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“The whole process of finding artifacts to support the application for landmark status was so fascinating and so fun because we’re all big genealogy people in my family,” Heitmanek said.
She read obituaries of her ancestors and found a common thread that defined them: “hard work and integrity.”
Fred Long, Oliver Beidelman’s uncle and a local cabinet maker, established the business in the 1860s. A 19th-century structure documented as Long’s workshop and facing Jackson Avenue also is part of the family’s landmark request.
“I think it’s terrific that they really want to do this,” said Jane Ory Burke, board secretary of Naperville Preservation, Inc., which helped prepare the application. “I think it’s terrific that they’re so dedicated to Naperville, that this is important to them.”
Designed in the Collegiate Gothic style, the larger brick building contained a funeral parlor and a furniture store. That might sound like an odd coupling, but as the landmark application notes, building furniture and coffins required “similar skills and materials.”
The vintage Beidelman sign looms over the corner of Jackson Avenue and Washington Street in downtown Naperville. “Becoming a local landmark gives the building some protection,” says Jane Ory Burke, board secretary of Naperville Preservation, Inc.
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“It was not all that unusual back then,” Ory Burke said. “There were a lot of kind of dual-purpose businesses. It’s just that this one retains those features.”
Because the building was both a funeral home and a furniture store, there are “lovely chapel windows” on the north end of the Washington Street facade, Ory Burke said. The building also had the very first elevator in Naperville, and it was the first retail outlet for Kroehler furniture.
A top city employer for decades, Kroehler Manufacturing “provided stable, middle-class incomes, while Beidelman’s provided the goods of a middle-class lifestyle, selling furniture that furnished many new suburban homes,” the landmark application says of the ties between the two Naperville institutions.
“The brick building is really an iconic building there on Washington Street as you’re coming into downtown Naperville, particularly from the south,” Ory Burke said.
To Heitmanek, its importance is personal. She grew up in the business.
“As far as selling furniture and knowing about furniture, we all grew up there,” says Katelyn Heitmanek in the family-owned Beidelman Furniture store in Naperville.
Brian Hill/[email protected]
“It’s all felt really natural. I spent so much time there as a little kid, it’s hard for me to imagine doing anything else,” Heitmanek said.
Even recently, the store delivered a sofa to a longtime customer of her grandfather, Owen “Dutch” Beidelman, a city council member from 1947 to 1971.
“We’ve all kind of contributed to this thing that’s higher than ourselves,” Heitmanek said.
If the city approves the request, the adjoining structures would become the first commercial buildings landmarked in Naperville. The Historic Preservation Commission is set to review the request on Thursday, July 25. After the commission makes its recommendation, the proposal will go to the city council.
The application contains the original receipts for the elevator and building materials as well as old photos. “It’s all in the family,” Ory Burke said.