Hotels in buildings by Benjamin Marshall

Benjamin Marshall was Chicago’s great architect of luxury. As the design partner of Marshall & Fox — his firm with engineer Charles Fox — he gave the city some of its most glamorous early-twentieth-century hotels and apartment buildings, pairing Beaux-Arts grandeur with a showman’s love of the grand public room.

Three of his buildings still operate as hotels. The Blackstone of 1910 is a Chicago Landmark and was known for decades as the Hotel of Presidents, having housed twelve consecutive occupants of the office; Harry Truman played the ‘Missouri Waltz’ on its piano and Dwight Eisenhower watched his own 1952 nomination on television in the building.

The Drake opened on New Year’s Eve 1920 in Italian Renaissance dress and became high society’s first choice through the twenties, drawing Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, George Gershwin and Charles Lindbergh, and later Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana. Its Cape Cod Room, opened 1933, was reportedly the country’s first themed restaurant; Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio carved their initials into the bar counter, which survives.

The 1911 Federal Life Building on Michigan Avenue, now Arlo Chicago, completes the group.