Hotels in buildings by William Le Baron Jenney

William Le Baron Jenney is often called ‘the father of the skyscraper.’ His Home Insurance Building of 1885 is widely credited as the first tall building carried on a metal frame — the innovation that made the modern high-rise possible — and his office trained a generation of Chicago School architects.

Two of his buildings now take overnight guests, and both came close to not doing so. The Kimpton Gray Hotel occupies the 1894 New York Life Insurance Building at the corner of Monroe and LaSalle — built as twelve classical stories for $800,000, later raised to fourteen, and one of three neighboring Jenney towers on LaSalle Street. Its Georgia Gray marble gives the hotel its name, and the lobby bar, Vol. 39, takes its own from the building’s LaSalle Street address.

In 2005 a developer’s plan for a fifty-two-story tower would have required partially demolishing it. Preservation Chicago named the building to its annual Chicago 7 Most Endangered list and pressed the city for landmark protection; designation followed, and in 2014 Kimpton bought the tower and spent more than $100 million restoring it rather than gutting it — uncovering marble hidden beneath carpet and laminate and repairing hundreds of historic windows.

Hotel Blake occupies the 1896 Morton Building in Printers Row. Both are the work of Jenney & Mundie, the partnership Jenney practiced under in his later years.