Ottawa is a little over an hour southwest of Chicago via interstates 55 and 80. The best approach is to leave I-80 at route 71 and follow that road southwest into town; at the intersection with route 6 you can see on both sides of the road a sort of hilly, strip-mined wasteland.
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Large tracts of land along the north bank of the Illinois have been mined either for silica or for coal, but the bluff that now makes up Buffalo Rock State Park was spared; it became a state park after first serving as a home for a religious sect and then as a tuberculosis sanatorium. It’s a wooded aerie with picnic tables, a baseball field, and a short hiking trail along the bluff’s top that offers fine views of the river below. There’s a real live buffalo in a pen, too. The park’s a couple of miles west of Ottawa off Dee Bennett Road (815-433-2220). Of course, firearms and off-road-vehicle fans can ply their hobbies at the nearby Buffalo Pit and Range (815-433-2471).
Outdoor recreation is the main reason most people visit the Ottawa area, and the ne plus ultra of the region’s numerous parks is Starved Rock State Park (815-667-4726), on the south side of the river. Its 2,630 wooded acres are dissected by a number of abrupt, steep-walled canyons whose walls drip with springs and bloom with liverworts, mosses, and ferns. The riverfront bluffs support an entirely different flora of drought-tolerant pine and cedar and provide expansive views of river traffic. Starved Rock, a striated sandstone point overlooking one of the Army Corps of Engineers’ navigation dams, has a long history–it was the site of one of the first French colonial forts in the midwest. The rock’s name derives from a semilegendary battle between the Illinois and Pottawatomie Indians–early settlers reported that the latter laid siege to the Illinois on the bluff and forced their death by starvation.
The modern successor to the I&M Canal is the Illinois Waterway, which is what the Army Corps of Engineers renamed the Illinois River when they dammed it up. One of the river’s several lock-and-dam units is at Starved Rock. On the north side of the river, the corps operates the Illinois Waterway Visitor Center (815-667-4054), where you can watch towboats and barges (or, more commonly, cabin cruisers and bass boats) being raised or lowered in the lock and study exhibits depicting the waterway’s history, including a real pilothouse from a sunken towboat. The center’s open daily from 9 to 5, 9 to 8 after Memorial Day. Tours of the lock and dam are offered Saturday and Sunday through August at 11:30, 1, and 3.
Ottawa does have a number of good restaurants. The Row House Cafe (728 Columbus St., 815-433-2233, open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 to 3) is a bright coffeehouse in a block of old redbrick town houses that could have been transplanted from Lincoln Park. So could the eminently affordable food, in fact, which runs to salads, dressed-up croissants, and muffins. The coffee’s good, too–no small thing to ask in a town where the water has such a high mineral content.
Ottawa is serviced by a number of standard-issue motels, including the Ottawa Inn (3000 Columbus St., 815-434-3400) and the Super 8 (500 E. Etna Road, 815-434-2888). But they don’t have the character of Annie Tique’s Inn, a railroad hotel built in 1917 in Marseilles, the next town east along the river (378 Main St., 815-795-5848). The place hasn’t changed much since then (except for the TVs and waterbeds)–it still has gleaming dark woodwork, some antiques, and washbasins in the smallish rooms. Most of the rooms have been converted to apartments (Marseilles doesn’t see much tourist traffic), and the thin walls and lack of carpeting mean nights here can get noisy.
