The former Chicago Daily News Building is among the city’s best examples of Art Deco architecture, a big beautiful sculpted slab of limestone that has been a superlative study in detail, material, function and form for almost 100 years.
Rising from the west bank of the Chicago River at Madison Street, the building was masterfully designed by Holabird & Root for the old Chicago Daily News when both entities were at the apex of their powers.
The building is a city landmark in every sense of the word.
Except the one that really counts.
The historic Daily News Building is not a protected city landmark. That means it — along with its remarkable river edge plaza and its still-intact Art Deco lobby — are not safe from being razed and replaced.
And that matters now. The 26-story building, better known as 2 N. Riverside, has been put up sale by the late real estate mogul Sam Zell’s estate.
It might be hard to believe this building and plaza could come down in favor of a tall, new, Wolf Point-style office tower — and there appear to be no current plans to do so.
But this is still Chicago. And the right deal can make virtually anything possible.
Built for the Jazz Age
For the young’uns out there, if you want to understand how powerful big city newspapers were in the early 20th century, look at the headquarters they built for themselves then.
Almost all of the buildings — from the Los Angeles Times now-former offices to the New York Times historic old home at 229 E. 43rd St — were well-crafted monuments to the news business.
The buildings conveyed trust, substance and influence. And the company’s rich owners could hire the top architects of the day to get those points across.
A certain Chicago broadsheet held an international design competition in 1922 to find an architect for its now former headquarters, drawing the world’s best design firms.
Holabird & Roche (the firm’s name at the time) came in third place, but soon after, as Holabird & Root, they snagged the commission to design the Daily News Building.
At a time when most downtown structures either faced away or stood back from the then-filthy Chicago River, Holabird & Root’s U-shaped Daily News complex audaciously turned its glorious Indiana limestone face toward the waterway, then hugged it with a handsome 17,000-square-foot public plaza rich with bas-relief artwork.
The structure was built over an active rail yard, becoming the first in the U.S. to be built on air rights. Holabird & Root designed a dazzling pass-through that allowed access through the building to the Chicago & North Western station to the west. (The Ogilvie Transportation Center occupies the passenger rail depot’s spot now.)
The nearly 200-foot-long concourse was full-on Jazz Age Art Deco. The concave ceiling featured a 180-foot mural by John Warner Norton, called “Gathering the News, Printing the News, Transporting the News.”
Daily News reporter Marguerite Williams wrote the colorful and frenetic abstract mural represented the “rhythmic teamwork of man and machine that makes the modern newspaper possible and the paraphernalia of news-gathering that has shrunk the globe into one neighborhood.”
The Daily News Building’s July 8, 1929, dedication was quite the event. Hundreds of attendees crowded the plaza. President Herbert Hoover fired up the presses by pushing a button in Washington, D.C.
“Observers at the time were well aware of the importance of the Chicago Daily News building,” said architecture historian Robert Bruegmann, author of “The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chicago 1880-1918.”
“It is conspicuous that it won the Gold Medal of the Chicago [chapter of the American Institute of Architects] and that of the Architectural League of New York in 1930,” he said. “This latter … signals that the New York architects were finally willing to acknowledge that Chicago was producing buildings every bit as good as anything in their own city.”
The Daily News called the building home until it moved in with its sister paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, in 1960, located in a new modernist building — now demolished — at 401 N. Wabash Ave.
The venerable and respected Daily News published its last edition March 4, 1978.
An ‘outstanding’ building
But the building left behind by the Daily News survives. And the city’s Department of Planning and the landmarks commission have a duty to make sure that remains the case.
Honestly, the building should have been landmarked decades ago.
The building’s exterior could use a good cleaning, but it has been well-maintained under Zell’s ownership.
But if demolition seems improbable, think again. Zell himself also wanted to replace the Daily News Building with a new tower back in 2000 until Mayor Richard M. Daley put the kibosh on the plan.
Zell came back in 2008 with a bid to shoehorn a new skyscraper next to the historic building, obliterating that marvelous and historic plaza.
Then the recession hit, and that was that.
Another cause for concern: Crain’s Chicago Business reported last month the building is unlikely to fetch a price more than whatever Zell’s firm, Equity Group Investments, still owes on a $65 million loan taken out against the structure in 2016.
The groups Landmarks Illinois and Preservation Chicago have pushed for landmark designation for the Daily News Building since 2008.
“The building is architecturally significant as an outstanding example of Art Deco design and was the first office building in Chicago featuring a riverfront public plaza,” said Landmarks Illinois Advocacy Manager Kendra Parzen.
Fortunately, the building is among the relatively few Chicago structures rated “red” — the highest — in the city’s Historic Resources Survey.
And since 2003, any demo or construction permit pulled on a red- or orange-rated building triggers an automatic review to determine if preliminary landmark status should be granted.
But in a city that takes its architecture seriously, it shouldn’t take the out-and-out threat of a demolition to finally start figuring out if the Daily News Building is a landmark worthy of protection.
And about that Norton mural …
Zell, who died last year, took down the artwork for repairs and conservation in 1993, and it hasn’t been publicly seen since.
Bruegmann said the mural “is certainly one of the largest and most accomplished examples of 1920s American modern art anywhere.”
The concourse is incomplete without it. The mural needs to find its way back home.
A Department of Planning spokesperson wouldn’t say if the agency will now seek landmark status for the Daily News Building. He also wouldn’t comment on the building’s worthiness as a potential landmark.
“Staff is confident that you will make a logical case for it meeting criteria,” the spokesperson said.
An architecture critic has raised the alarm. Now it’s city government’s turn to make news by getting a landmark designation, ensuring the Daily News’s final front page headline — “So long, Chicago” — doesn’t end up applying to the building itself.
Lee Bey is architecture critic for the Sun-Times and appears on ABC7 News Chicago. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.
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