Anyone who has driven the Tri-State Tollway near Wadsworth knows the pyramid. It sits back from Dilleys Road, gold-painted and impossible to miss, the kind of thing you point out to a passenger even after you've seen it fifty times. For most of the last several years, that's all it was: something to see through the fence. A fire gutted the building in July 2018, tours stopped, and the place settled into the local memory as a curiosity that used to be open.
It isn't just a memory anymore. The Gold Pyramid House was rebuilt by 2022, and this year its calendar has quietly filled with actual live shows, the kind of Saturday-night bookings you'd expect from a real venue, not a roadside attraction waiting to be photographed from the car. If you assumed the pyramid was still closed behind its hieroglyph-covered walls, you're behind on your own town.
The Fence Everyone Remembers
The fire that damaged the Gold Pyramid House in 2018 was serious enough that tours were canceled indefinitely, and for a long stretch that was the last update most people had. The Onan family's 17,000-square-foot pyramid, built in 1977 as a private residence and later opened for weekly tours, went quiet. The triple-pyramid garage and the towering Ramses statue stayed visible from the road, but the gates stayed shut.
By 2022 the structure had been rebuilt. That part of the story has circulated a little, mostly among people tracking odd Illinois landmarks. What hasn't circulated as widely is what happened next: the grounds started hosting events again, and by 2026 those events had turned into a genuine concert calendar.
What Actually Came Back
This past summer alone, the Gold Pyramid grounds hosted a run of shows that reads more like a small music venue's booking sheet than a tourist stop's occasional open house. WIIL Power and the Angry Squirrels played a rock night there in late June. Doghouse Society took the stage in July. RealTime Noise played in early August, and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute act closed out the month. A Fat Cat Rescue bingo fundraiser used the space too, which tells you the venue isn't just booking bands, it's become the kind of place local groups think to use.
None of this made headlines. It showed up the way local things usually do, on event calendars and word of mouth, easy to miss if you'd already filed the pyramid under "used to be open." The pattern is the story here: a landmark that spent years being something you drove past has become something you drive to.
| Year | Status |
|---|---|
| July 2018 | Fire damages the structure; tours canceled indefinitely |
| 2022 | Rebuild complete |
| Summer 2026 | Regular concert bookings, including WIIL Power, Doghouse Society, and a Skynyrd tribute act |
If the summer calendar is any indication, the fall lineup is worth checking directly rather than assuming there isn't one.
Down Route 41, the Original Anchor
The pyramid gets the double-takes, but Van Patten Woods has been Wadsworth's actual outdoor anchor since before most current residents were born. It became Lake County's first forest preserve in 1961, and it's still built around the same features that made it worth protecting: an 86-acre Sterling Lake, an oak forest, and a stretch of the Des Plaines River that runs straight through the property.
Sterling Lake has a wheelchair-accessible floating dock, two fishing piers, and a boat ramp for cartop craft like canoes, kayaks, and paddleboards, with electric trolling motors allowed. If you'd rather put in upstream, there's a canoe launch on Russell Road, and the next one downstream is 6.25 river miles away at Wadsworth Road, which is a useful number if you're planning a paddle instead of just a launch and turnaround. Five miles of trails cover hiking, biking, horseback riding, and cross-country skiing, and the Des Plaines River Trail bisects the preserve, connecting to a longer regional route for anyone who wants more than a loop around the lake. There's also an off-leash dog park on-site for anyone whose weekend plans revolve around a dog that needs to run.
September mornings here tend to bring cooler air off the lake and fewer bugs than midsummer, which makes it one of the better windows for a full loop rather than a quick lap.
Where Everyone Already Ends Up
If Van Patten Woods is where the day starts, The Shanty is usually where it ends. The restaurant on US-41 has been a gathering spot for over a hundred years, rebuilt in 2010 using reclaimed barn wood from local farms, which is part of why the dining room feels older and more settled than a decade-old renovation usually does. It's been featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and the whiskey shrimp, jumbo shrimp in a Jack Daniel's cream sauce, is the dish regulars order for out-of-town guests specifically to make a point.
The detail that matters most if you're planning a Saturday around it: live music runs Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. in the restaurant's East Bar. That's not a seasonal or occasional booking, it's a standing weekly rhythm, which makes The Shanty one of the few spots in Wadsworth where you can count on something happening on any given weekend without checking a calendar first.
A Fall Saturday That Doesn't Require the Tollway
Put the three together and you get a full day that starts and ends without leaving town.
- Morning: paddle Sterling Lake or walk a loop of the Des Plaines River Trail at Van Patten Woods, when the September air is cooler and the trail is quieter than it was in July
- Afternoon: swing by Dilleys Road to see what the Gold Pyramid grounds have booked for the coming weeks, since the summer calendar suggests fall shows are likely rather than hypothetical
- Evening: end at The Shanty for dinner and the Friday or Saturday live set in the East Bar
None of this requires a drive to Gurnee or a trip across the state line. It's the same three-stop loop that residents who've lived here longer than the pyramid's rebuild might not know exists yet.
The Point
Wadsworth still gets described, by outsiders and sometimes by its own residents, as a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else, the exit before Wisconsin, the town with the gold thing on the tollway. That description was more accurate when the pyramid was closed and the calendar behind it was empty. It's less accurate now. Between a forest preserve that's been drawing paddlers and hikers since 1961, a landmark that rebuilt itself into an actual concert venue, and a century-old restaurant with a live band every weekend, there's more happening within a few miles of Dilleys Road than most of the people driving past it realize.
We track this kind of thing at Gina Shad because we work in these towns, not just around them, and the small shifts, a reopened venue, a restaurant's standing weekend booking, tell us as much about a neighborhood's character as anything on a listing sheet. If you're curious what else has changed in Wadsworth or the surrounding Lake County towns, or you're weighing a move within the area and want a read on the market that goes beyond the surface, request your complimentary home valuation and marketing plan and let's talk about what your next move actually looks like.
