What guests are saying
What guests love
- Being inside an architectural landmark — Goldberg’s curved, petal-like towers are a global icon (and a Wilco album cover).
- A riverfront River North location steps from the House of Blues and the Riverwalk, a 10-minute walk to the Magnificent Mile.
- Floor-to-ceiling windows with river and skyline views in many rooms.
What to keep in mind
- The hotel is the rectilinear building, not the round towers themselves
- A busy entertainment block along the river
Best for Design and architecture lovers who want to stay inside one of Chicago’s most iconic modern landmarks, right on the river.
Summary of guest reviews. Sources: Hotel Chicago Downtown, Autograph Collection, Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Preservation Chicago. Photography courtesy of Hotel Chicago Downtown, Autograph Collection by Marriott, used with permission. Details may change over time.
Why this building matters
Bertrand Goldberg designed Marina City for the Building Service Employees’ International Union, and crews built it between 1960 and 1967 on 3.1 acres of former Chicago & North Western rail yard on the north bank of the river. A janitors’ union paid for it. The $36 million complex holds five interconnected structures: two sixty-story residential towers, a theater, a ten-story office building, and the two-story base they all stand on. Goldberg called it a “city within a city.”
The designation report credits it with three firsts, and they are more specific than the claim this page used to carry. Marina City was the first planned development project in Chicago. It was the first and largest federally insured downtown housing project in the country. And it was the first complex of its kind to layer residential, commercial and entertainment uses into a dense high rise in the center city. When the residential towers opened in 1963, they were the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world and the tallest apartment buildings in the world.
The hotel occupies the office building. The report’s own site map labels that structure “10-story Office Building (Hotel),” so this is not a guess about which part of the complex you sleep in.
The building the hotel occupies
Crews built the office building between 1962 and 1964. Ten stories of concrete and glass rise above the upper plaza on concrete groin vaults carried by slender columns, and the slab runs east and west across the entire width of the site. Goldberg gave it a second job beyond holding offices: he designed it as a screen, a “backstop to the residential towers” that would “shelter the project from the undeveloped area lying to the north.”
Its walls carry their own load. The narrow concrete mullions that texture the exterior were cast in place, and they double as the frames for the windows. Beneath the tower, a horizontal two-story block with a recessed glazed first floor and a blank second floor ties the offices to the street and to the commercial platform that runs through the complex.
The building became a hotel through a bankruptcy. Marina City’s owners defaulted on the mortgage and filed in the early 1990s, and in 1994 John Marks bought the commercial properties — the theater, the office building, the retail spaces and the garages inside the residential towers — for $3.35 million. He converted the office tower into a hotel and the theater into a live entertainment venue. The theater operates today as the House of Blues.
How Marina City was built
The towers went up about a floor a day, with crews alternating between the east and west shafts. A Linden climbing tower crane, developed in Denmark a few years earlier, was one of several innovations that made the pace possible.
The top forty floors of the two towers originally held 896 apartments, arranged around each central core in sixteen outward-flaring shapes the report calls “petals.” Goldberg never accepted the comparison everyone reaches for. He described the plan as a tree, with the apartments extending like branches, or as a sunflower — not a corncob.
He wanted more than he got. Goldberg planned to cantilever the apartment floors entirely from the core, and the engineer Fred Severud vetoed it on cost: “It might work, but you’re doing so many things that are for the first time, save that for the second go-round.” Goldberg added concrete columns at the perimeter, so only the semicircular balconies cantilever. The theater came last, finished in 1967, its saddle-shaped concrete roof rising to 114 feet on the east side and 74 feet on the west.