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Historically, State Street has always been a retail gateway, it was apart of an Indian trail, which was called the Hubbard’s Trail and connected Chicago with trading outposts.  The growth and development of State Street starts in the 1860’s when Potter Palmer, a businessman convinced Marshall Field and Levi Leiter to join his successful dry goods store. Palmer sold his shares of the store and continued to develop real estate on State Street.   Today we know this store as Marshal Fields, which is now owned by Macy’s.   Palmer was an enterprising man, who built the Palmer Hotel (Palmer Hilton Hotel) as a wedding present for his wife and after it burned down from the Great Chicago Fire, he rebuilt a grander hotel.  In 1897, Thomas Edison filmed State Street and stated that it was “The busiest corner in Chicago. Cable cars and street traffic of all descriptions. Hundreds of shoppers. Fine perspective view looking north toward the Masonic Temple.”  Take a look of the bustling State Street filmed by Edison below:

The three-building Montgomery Ward complex on the north branch of the river is a great place for an architecture lesson, and at the same time represents major Chicago history. The only problem on our river tour is that we first see the buildings from the newest to the oldest, so it seems we are telling the story backward! Plus, there’s a fourth Ward building downtown. Four commercial structures built by one company in 1899, 1907, 1930, and 1974, with new commercial and residential uses today. Nothing else like it in Chicago.

Picture yourself on a boat tour heading north on the North Branch of the Chicago River. We pass Montgomery Ward Park at Erie Street and can see a tall broad blue glass building, edged vertically in stone. No corner windows, an interesting version of modernism. This is “The Montgomery” condominium, once headquarters of Montgomery Ward built in 1974, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a famous Japanese-American modernist. Yamasaki’s work can be seen throughout the U.S. and from Saudi Arabia to Saskatchewan, but his most famous buildings were the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City completed in the early 1970s. His picture was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1963. “The Montgomery” is his only building in Chicago, but he designed the stunning North Shore Congregation Israel temple in suburban Glencoe (1964). Yamasaki died in 1986 at age 74, long before 9/11.

Continuing north, we pass the long riverside of the 1930 Administration Building designed by Wards’ own in-house engineering and construction department under supervision of chief engineer Willis McCauley. After 2000 and the closing of Montgomery Ward & Co., the developers who acquired this building converted it to condominiums, added balconies, carved out a riverwalk and named it “One River Place.” We can see the features of art deco here, with vertical piers and ornament that is flat to the surface and geometric, with the tower entrance at its SE corner. McCauley went on to oversee the building of a number of offices and stores for Wards as the original catalog company expanded into retail across the country, along with its competitor Sears Roebuck. This building features a sculpture atop the tower called artist unknown, a graceful female form.

Cruising beyond the 1914 Chicago Avenue Bridge, we come to the long, low, horizontal drama of the original Wards’ “Catalog Building,” a warehouse and distribution center completed in 1907 by Chicago Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden & Martin. Additions were built as the company grew, in 1917, 1940 and 1970. This building is in the books if one studies Chicago architecture because it was the biggest reinforced concrete building in the world at the time, and a major Prairie School statement. We can see the dramatic horizontals in ribbons of brick, and can admire the ornament in painted brown terra cotta which reminds us of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan who were in Chicago at the time. Illinois is the Prairie State, with miles of flat land, and the Prairie School style emphasizes the horizontal, clearly represented in this Wards building. Today it houses commercial space, residences, restaurants, and a grand lighted river walk.

The fourth Montgomery Ward building is the first built, in 1899. It overlooks Millenium Park on Michigan Avenue at Madison Street. The “Tower Building” is the first Ward skyscraper designed by Richard Schmidt as a young man. In 1923, a 4-story tower was added to the building by architects Holabird & Roche, topped with a weather vane sculpture of a dramatic female figure by John Massey Rhind, “Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce.” The tower’s original pointed top, weathervane statue and all, was dismantled in 1947 for “safety reasons,” the sculpture cut into pieces, some going to collectors. In 2013, the head of this sculpture was auctioned and sold to a Chicagoan. The Tower Building can be seen in images of Chicago’s skyline taken after 1923, standing taller than all the other buildings lining Michigan Avenue south of the river, Chicago’s “Cultural Mile.”

By Judith, Docent for Chicagoline Cruises

In fact, Samuel Insull, founder of Commonwealth Edison, almost single-handedly brought electric power to Chicago early in the 20th century. A few short decades later, architecture and electricity would converge on the city in unprecedented fashion, spawning a renaissance. For much of the 1920s, breathtaking skyscrapers were to be built by the dozen, and Insull’s customers for power would surge into the millions. Chicago emerged fully, shedding its image as “mud city” and stepping into the future with abandon.

Common folklore often depicts Thomas Edison as the inventor of the light bulb. In reality, his invention was not quite as simple as a single consumer product. Far from it. Electric power, as envisioned by Edison, was an industry as vast as it was complicated, and ultimate success would come slowly and with many difficulties. Electricity was not a mere generational improvement upon the technology of the day, it was an entirely new and untested enterprise; one that required, among other undertakings, inventing every component of the complex technology, creating an industry to manufacture each component, engineering the infrastructure that would install and deliver the technology, and, finally, selling the technology. In short, electrical power produced and sold on a mass scale was almost certainly a larger enterprise than the computer revolution that would come a century later.

For Edison’s part, he soon realized that in Samuel Insull he had hired much more than a personal secretary—a job that initially had Insull performing such mundane personal services as fetching Edison’s umbrella, buying his clothes and waking him from naps. The young Englishman proved to be a match for Edison in every respect; able to equal his boss in workload, orderliness, as well as his in tenacity for negotiation. Above all else, Insull was a loyal protégé when it mattered most. In the critical decade for Edison’s business of the 1880s—a period that saw, among other accomplishments, the construction of the first central power plant in the United States, the Pearl Street Station,—Insull was there to oversee all of it. It was a frenzied and optimistic decade, and one that would fully prepare Insull for his next station in life.

In the year 1892, Chicago was the dominant metropolis in the Midwest, the regional epicenter of exchange and innovation led by titans of industry like Ogden, Field, Pullman and McCormick. Ever the Second City on the continent to New York, however, Chicago lacked both the electricity its Eastern rival possessed and a master to oversee such an industry. Samuel Insull’s moment had arrived, and he accepted it, somewhat reluctantly. Though not fond of Chicago from previous visits (he found the city filthy and full of rats) , upon Edison’s urging, Insull moved to Chicago on July 1, 1892, accepting a three-year contract as president of the Chicago Edison Company. Upon his arrival, the most pressing issue for the city was the oncoming Columbian Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which itself promised to be the greatest display of electric lighting the world had ever seen. For Insull, however, the job he envisioned for himself was much larger in scope. He sought nothing less than to create an electric monopoly in Chicago. His motive was more egalitarian than capitalist as he publicly called for electricity to be available to “even the smallest consumer” , whereas others sought to make it a luxury item only. Whatever his motives, the market potential was enormous. In 1892, Chicago had more than one million inhabitants and less than 5,000 users of electricity. In this environment, Insull began growing—both organically and by takeover of competitors—an empire that would become known as Commonwealth Edison. Needless to say, he stayed in Chicago well past his three-year contract.

As Insull’s company and personal fortune grew, so too did his social standing. A member of the Chicago elite, Insull became know for his European tastes, as well as for his personal acts of charity, most of which were notably performed outside the establishment. Likewise, Insull was also a proponent of the fine arts, particularly the opera. A fan since his childhood in London, when as a boy he would sit in the upper gallery far from the “bejeweled ladies in the finest boxes” , Insull aspired to make the opera—like his electricity—available to everyone in the city. In 1922, he became guarantor of the Manhattan Opera Company, which had relocated to Chicago after failing in New York. In this role, Insull kept strict control over the company budget, and also set out to democratize the opera, a goal that included luring patrons from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and limiting the number of productions performed in French. (This latter move caused Chicago’s most celebrated opera star, Mary Garden, to quit, feeling Insull was vulgarizing the art form). Friction with the upper crust over these decisions would prove to be relatively minor compared to Insull’s next move. To the chagrin of many of the city’s social class, Insull began work on his own opera house—The Civic Opera Building—which was to be built within an office building on the ground level, using investor money, and containing not a single prominent box. This project, which would ultimately cost $4 million dollars, once-and-for-all pitted Insull against Chicago’s elite. In addition to being divisive (dubbed “Insull’s Throne” by its detractors), the magnificent structure was also near perfection in design, providing impeccable views, acoustics and stage design; and lives to this day as the best of Chicago architecture of the 1920s. The building also marked an end to the Chicago renaissance, the roaring 20’s and the fortune of Samuel Insull. Ten days before the opening performance in Insull’s theater on November 4, 1929, the stock market crash had ushered in the Great Depression.

At its peak in the late 1920’s, Samuel Insull’s empire was immense. Commonwealth Edison alone was worth $400 million (about $5.6 billion today), and combined with gas entities like People’s Gas and Public Service of Northern Illinois, the Insull companies served more than 4 million customers, producing nearly 15% of all the electricity and gas in the United States, an amount more than any other nation on earth at the time. Ultimately, his holding company collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression, wiping out the life savings of half a million shareholders. His lifetime of business deals were now under scrutiny from the Federal Government, and Insull fled the country. He was later arrested and extradited back to the United States by Turkey in 1934 to face federal prosecution on mail fraud and antitrust charges, and was ultimately found not guilty on all counts.

Samuel Insull left Chicago as a visitor for the last time in May of 1938. Two months later, on the morning of July 16, Insull entered a Paris subway, and while waiting for a train he had a heart attack and died. He had 84 cents in his pocket. This humble end to Samuel Insull’s life—below ground, virtually penniless—belies the glory that he brought to Chicago. He did nothing short of taking the most beautiful skyline in the world and make it glow in magnificent light.

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McDonald, Forrest. Insull. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1962. Print.

Written by Bill, Docent for Chicagoline Cruises

Schlesinger & Mayer doors opened in 1903 but closed in 1904 due to financial problems. Rival retailer, Carson Pirie and Scott moved in the building and hired Daniel Burnham to complete the final additions in 1906. The retailer occupied the space for over 100 years and the building was known as the Carson Pirie Scott & Company Building. The Sullivan Center became a Chicago landmark in 1970 and National Historic Landmark in 1975. Last year Target moved into the historical building and opened its first store in downtown Chicago.

The visionaries used iron and steel frames and complemented the metal structures with beautiful terra cotta. They learned to use metal frames because most of the buildings before the fire lacked structural support; moreover, this was why few buildings survived the fire.

Terra cotta was primarily used to decorate the exterior of buildings. The clay ceramic could be shaped into any decoration and was a native material to Illinois. The Chicago School is also known for its wide horizontal windows that consist of a large fixed center panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows. The School is known to have distinct designs for the ground story, the main office floors, and the roof. Other Chicago School features include elements of neoclassical architecture like classical columns and cornice.

Historically, State Street has always been a retail gateway, it was apart of an Indian trail, which was called the Hubbard’s Trail and connected Chicago with trading outposts.  The growth and development of State Street starts in the 1860’s when Potter Palmer, a businessman convinced Marshall Field and Levi Leiter to join his successful dry goods store. Palmer sold his shares of the store and continued to develop real estate on State Street.   Today we know this store as Marshal Fields, which is now owned by Macy’s.   Palmer was an enterprising man, who built the Palmer Hotel (Palmer Hilton Hotel) as a wedding present for his wife and after it burned down from the Great Chicago Fire, he rebuilt a grander hotel.  In 1897, Thomas Edison filmed State Street and stated that it was “The busiest corner in Chicago. Cable cars and street traffic of all descriptions. Hundreds of shoppers. Fine perspective view looking north toward the Masonic Temple.”  Take a look of the bustling State Street filmed by Edison below: