Scraping the Sky!

Looking north along the Chicago River from Monroe Street

Majestic barely begins to describe the skyscrapers of Chicago.  These grandiose towers call to me, despite my childhood spent on the Kansas prairies where nothing intrudes upon the horizon for as far as the eye can see but an occasional tree or grain elevator.  Soon after my arrival here in Chicago, I could no longer resist the lure of these imposing buildings.  

A locomotive backed the train into the city and then pulled it northwest on my return trip. 

I boarded a Metra train at the Arlington Park station and headed downtown to explore the caverns created by these buildings that scrape the sky.

I was fortunate to arrive in time to join a Chicago Institute of Architecture walking tour led by docent Bobbi Pinkert. She handed out headsets; then, marched us through a 2-hour tour of the Loop to show us examples of different eras of Chicago architecture.

In 1871, the Great Fire of Chicago leveled almost three square miles of downtown, sweeping away nearly 18,000 buildings and leaving more than a 100,000 people homeless.  That disaster paved the way for innovative architects to use new materials and methods to replace the wooden structures that the fire swept away.  The sky beckoned.  

Manhattan Building, 431 S. Dearborn Street

William Le Baron Jenney led the way up.  His Manhattan building, built in 1891, was a marvel.  The first sixteen-story building in the United States, it was, for a brief time, the tallest building in the world.  Jenney used skeleton steel-framing to reach that height.  Today the Manhattan is one of the few surviving steel-framed buildings in Chicago.  


Bay windows maximize the light admitted to the building's interior and also provide a whimsical view of its grotesques when looking up from the street.  

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood," stated noted Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham.  

The Rookery, 209 S. La Salle Street

Burham, along with his partner John Wellborn Root, designed another beloved Chicago landmark, The Rookery, built from 1885-1889 on the site of Chicago's original city hall.  Named for the pigeons that once nested in the eaves of the old city hall and for the politicians who roosted in its offices, the Rookery with its imposing Romanesque exterior was a dramatic transition in Chicago architecture. 

The Rookery is technically not a skyscraper since skyscrapers, by definition, have a steel skeleton.  Instead, the Rookery is supported by its thick masonry walls, covered by fireproof terra-cotta, that rise 11 stories.  To enable the portly businessmen of the Gilded Era to reach its top floor, the Rookery possessed a remarkable new invention, the hydraulic passenger elevator.  

The Rookery's sculpted birds

In a nod to the building's history, sculpted birds greet visitors at every entrance.

The Light Atrium in the Rookery

The Light Atrium, a central court capped with a skylight at the third story, makes the inside surprisingly airy and reminds one of a large bird cage.  

Frank Lloyd Wright modernized the Rookery's lobby in 1905, adding white carrara marble and 24 carat gold leaf embellishment to its walls.   

Staircase added by William Drummond in 1931

Still another renovation to the Rookery occurred in 1931 during the Great Depression.  The Rookery's owners hired William Drummond, a former employee of the architect firm, Burham & Wright, to modernize the lobby and create more rentable floor space.  Drummond removed the double staircases and sectioned off the lobby into two floors, providing room for additional tenants.  In the Light Atrium, he added this curved staircase to his newly recreated second floor.  In 1992, a revitalization of the building shined up its interior and returned its exterior to its original ruddy color.

"Form follows function" was mantra of architect Louis Sullivan.  

Carson Pirie Scott & Co., 1 S. State Street
(formerly the Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store)

Sullivan emphasized the horizontal layers of his 12-story Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store, built in 1899, in order to create large ground-floor windows to display the store's merchandise and entice shoppers to enter its corner entrance pavilion.

Ornamental facade at the corner entrance to the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. building

Sullivan used ornamental wrought iron as an artistic finish to his buildings.  If you look carefully at the photo above, you can see his initials LHS entwined amidst the botanical motifs.

The Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Avenue

Perhaps Sullivan's greatest work was the Auditorium Building which he designed and built in collaboration with partner Dankmar Adler in 1887-1889.  Although Chicago had surpassed Philadelphia as the second-largest city in the United States, New Yorkers still scoffed that Chicago was nothing but an industrial backwater, with no cultural amenities.  

The Auditorium Building's lobby

So a prominent Chicago businessman, Ferdinand W. Peck, proposed to build an enormous auditorium with such amazing acoustics that its presence would silence the slanderous comments from back East once and for all.  He chose Adler & Sullivan to bring his vision into reality.

The Auditorium Building
(photo courtesy of University of Chicago Digital Collections)

Upon Auditorium Building's completion, its excellent acoustics and unmarred sight lines are a tribute to Adler's expertise while its 4,000 seats accommodated 1,200 more concertgoers than New York's Metropolitan Opera House.  

Let's see if you can top that, New York!