When it comes to dramatic views of Chicago’s legendary Loop, the very best one in the city may be not from a million-dollar condo, but from a college dormitory.
The dormitory is a 15-story national landmark office building on a storied downtown intersection, the southwest corner of State and Madison Streets.
The grandly named Chicago Building–regarded as one of the finest examples of the city’s turn-of-the-century school of architecture so widely admired worldwide–was converted to student residences this summer by the School of the Art Institute and will be dedicated by Mayor Richard Daley on Thursday.
It’s the first Loop office building to be converted to residential use, said Susan Ross, spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. And a number of other conversions are nearing completion as part of a trend the city is pushing to revive the historic district.
Students getting ready for the opening of fall semester classes at the school on Thursday moved into the new dorm facilities, at 7 W. Madison St., over Labor Day weekend.
They are living in spaces that, when the building opened in 1905, held offices of some of the city’s best physicians, surgeons, optometrists, jewelers and small merchants of exclusive goods and services.
Designed by one of Chicago’s premier architectural firms, Holabird & Roche, the idea of the building was to create amenities for well-heeled shoppers. They could combine a trip to the doctor or dentist with some shopping at State Street’s collection of great department stores and high-end shops.
Of the new student occupants, Tony Jones, school president, said, “This place makes the whole city their classroom. We’ve put them at ground zero, the literal heart of Chicago.”
Sitting a few days ago in the window of a lofted, 14th floor double room in the building’s southwest corner, Jones admired a view that has the illusion of being suspended high over the middle of State Street looking north.
“There is just no other view like this in the city,” he said.
The view is an unimpeded vista of State Street. Marshall Field’s department store is in the right foreground, the Chicago Theatre’s giant red sign and marquee sits in the middle distance, and Marina City’s corncob towers dominate the far-off north skyline.
Amy Geerling, 21, a senior from Jackson, Mich., is well pleased with the less-spectacular view she has from her 7th floor room along State Street. She has views into the upper floors of another Chicago landmark building, Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott department store.
“In the morning, the sun gives the white stone (on Carson’s) a purply tinge,” she said, “and the hue changes all day long, until it becomes orangish from the street lights. It’s like a big, interactive painting.”
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Dawn Bennett, 21, a sophomore from Houston, said the school held focus groups with students last year to find out what they wanted in the new dorm: apartment-style units with private baths and kitchens, warm color schemes, large storage areas.
“People really respect the building a lot,” said Bennett, who has a single room with a view looking up State Street. “I can’t wait until the Christmas season and the view down the street then.”
The State and Madison Streets intersection is the zero point for numbering in the city’s grid street system. Street address numbers, ascending as they radiate out east, west, north and south, begin there.
The Chicago Building, with its dark, richly textured brick and terra cotta exterior, has gracefully but emphatically marked the spot since it was built.
Historians have long savored the building as one of the best-preserved examples of the classic “Chicago School of Architecture.”
The building interior has been altered many times to suit 90 years of the needs and tastes of changing tenants. But the building’s exterior and marble and brass Madison Street lobby remain pretty much as architects William Holabird and Martin Roche designed them.
Among the more notable exterior features of the design are its “Chicago-style” windows. They are wide panes of glass flanked by narrower, double-hung windows, allowing ventilation in days before air conditioning.
On the north face of the building the architects installed bay windows to maximize sunlight streaming into the interior, a boon for art students.
The building was originally put up to house the Chicago Savings Bank, though some historians believe the bank’s owners never intended it to be a permanent bank building.
When the building opened, the bankers rented out the ground floor to retailers, putting the bank itself on the second floor.
“It’s so little banklike, which is odd,” said Robert Bruegmann, a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of a just published book, “The Architects and the City, Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918,”
“The LaSalle Street banks of the time have massive, collonaded institutional exteriors that look like banks,” said Bruegmann. “The (Chicago Savings) bankers probably were interested more in attracting a retail, consumer trade.”
At the time, State Street had been given over almost exclusively to retail trade and hotels.
Early in the 19th Century, most business offices were connected to the factory plants or trading rooms where goods were produced or sold. As business became more complex, a new, managerial class of workers evolved.
Those managers often needed to work not near the shop room floors but in downtown business centers. They needed handy access to suppliers, competitors and professional services.
That meant the birth of office buildings, including “speculative” ones that offered office rentals to small firms and professionals who didn’t need and couldn’t afford to put up a building of their own.
When the Chicago Building opened, its upper floors offered such rentals. Its ground floor housed four shops, Buck & Rayner, druggists; J.W. Diffey, tobacconists; A. Reed Cushion Shoe Co.; and Clapp & Cowl, jewelers.
The building remained as a relatively prestigious medical, dental and professional building through World War II. Then it began to cater to lower-rent businesses, including beauticians, tax services and shoe repairmen.
By 1989, all floors above the second were left vacant while the building’s owner, the Chicago Board of Education, tried to find a buyer.
A year ago, the School of the Art Institute bought it for its second residence hall. The first opened in 1993 in the old Chicago Athletic Club, 112 S. Michigan Ave.
Since January, contractors have been creating the new dormitory spaces in the $10.5 million conversion project.
The first converted dorm “has continued to be so much in demand and so extraordinarily popular with students,” Jones said, “that we were in desperate need to find another building.”