Chicago School & Working Buildings | Historic Chicago Hotels

Seven buildings that Chicago made for itself. Two carry Chicago School in their own designation reports; the rest have no style recorded anywhere we hold, so what they are is what they were built to do.

The oldest is 1882: Adler & Sullivan’s Jewelers Building on Wabash, the only surviving example of the firm’s early work in the Loop and the oldest building in the city to carry Louis Sullivan’s floral ornament. It is now LIVN Millennium Park. Then the run of the 1890s: William Le Baron Jenney’s 1894 New York Life Insurance Building, which its report calls “an excellent example of Chicago School architecture” and one of only three Chicago School skyscrapers left on LaSalle Street, now the Kimpton Gray; the 1895 Reliance Building, a National Historic Landmark, now Staypineapple; and in 1896 the Morton Building in Printers Row, grouped by its own report with the Pontiac, Terminals and Transportation buildings as “commercial architecture ... evolving during the important years of the Chicago school”.

The working buildings are plainer still, and no source we hold assigns any of them a style. The Logan Square SRO of 1896 revives an old and increasingly rare Chicago lodging type. The Allis Building of 1908 was put up as the headquarters of the Chicago Belting Company, a leather tannery supplied by hides from the Union Stock Yards, and is now Soho House. The Neighborhood Hotel in Lincoln Park occupies an 1893 building of projecting bays and stepped gables. None of them was built to be looked at.