You can read the history of Chicago in the buildings of the South Loop. They show in their bones the successive identities the area has taken on since the Great Fire of 1871: enclave for the city’s super-rich, great rail center, manufacturing district, publishing and printing hub, crowded slums welcoming African-Americans of the Great Migration, and the gentrifying boomtown. Though many of the mansions and industrial buildings have been torn down, a wealth of interesting structures endures. Some are mentioned in Martha Bayne’s article; here are some of the other sites that reflect the neighborhood’s rich character and history.
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Architect William LeBaron Jenney was a bon vivant who, according to Louis Sullivan, loved to tell a good joke. Humor and architecture don’t always go together, but at Jenney’s steel-frame 1896 Morton Building (538 S. Dearborn), twin eight-story stacks of bay windows are hoisted aloft by a pair of sculpted atlantes (that’s the plural of Atlas, don’t you know). Their nether regions squared off and tied up in bows, they stand straight as pilasters at either end of the third floor. Bearded and ripped, they seem to be scowling a bit at their burden.
The imposing limestone, art deco-detailed Columbia College Dance Center (1306 S. Michigan) was once home to Paramount Pictures; the restaurant Zapatista (1307 S. Wabash) occupies a building built for Warner Brothers; and the restaurant Opera (1301 S. Wabash), a simple modernist structure with a curving glass block entrance, was originally the Chicago headquarters of Universal Studios.
The South Loop is full of turn-of-the-20th-century loft buildings, many converted to residential use. One of the best is the 1909 Munn Building, now the Loftrium (819 S. Wabash), whose wide windows make for an extremely light and open facade. The street-level windows and entrance are surrounded by intricate cast-iron ornament in the Louis Sullivan style. Just down the street is the former Fairbanks Morse and Company building and showroom, now the Fairbanks Lofts (900 S. Wabash). Floors three through seven have conventional windows between simple brick piers, but along the first two floors there’s an almost continuous strip of glass framed in cast-iron ornament, complete with asparaguslike columns, tall, thin, and topped with flowering capitals.
