A Chicago Historic Hotels story
How a Gilded-Age men’s club on Michigan Avenue became one of the city’s most beloved hotels.
Few buildings capture Gilded-Age Chicago like the Chicago Athletic Association. Its pointed-arch facade has looked out over Michigan Avenue and the lakefront for more than 130 years — and today you can sleep inside it.
When the building opened in 1893, Chicago was in the middle of the World’s Columbian Exposition and a frenzy of construction. The architect Henry Ives Cobb designed the clubhouse to echo the Doge’s Palace in Venice, wrapping a modern steel-framed building in an ornate Venetian Gothic skin of pointed arches and carved stone. The result still stands within the Historic Michigan Boulevard District — the famous “one-sided street” whose buildings face Grant Park and the lake.
For more than a hundred years the building served as an elite private athletic club — a members-only world of billiard rooms, a running track, and dining rooms hidden behind that ornate facade. Generations of Chicago’s business and civic figures passed through its doors while the public admired the building only from the sidewalk.
After the club closed, a meticulous restoration reopened the building as a hotel in 2015, preserving some of the finest Gilded-Age interiors in the city: the marble staircase lobby beneath a gilded coffered ceiling, mosaic floors, and carved-oak rooms. For the first time, anyone could walk in — and stay.
The building itself is the headline. Guests are wowed from the lobby, but the heart of the hotel is the second-floor Game Room, where billiards, bocce, and vintage parlor games sit under chalkboard murals. Downstairs, the Cherry Circle Room serves supper-club cocktails and dining, and the hidden Milk Room operates as a tiny speakeasy. Up top, the Cindy’s rooftop looks straight across Michigan Avenue to Millennium Park — one of the best views in the Loop.