When architect Louis Sullivan’s famed Chicago Stock Exchange Building was wrecked in 1972 to make room for a 44-story office tower, it caused an outrage that made national headlines and birthed the city’s modern preservation movement.
In an ironic twist 53 years later, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks next month will weigh granting preliminary landmark status for 30 N. LaSalle St., the nondescript building for which Sullivan’s masterpiece was sacrificed.
A draft report by the Landmarks Division of the city’s Department of Planning calls the building “exemplary” architecture that “displays all the character-defining features of an International Style high rise, while incorporating New Formalist elements that broke with strict Miesian tradition.”
The report also details the tower’s fraught history and even uses it help make the case for designating the building.
Landmarks Division architectural historian Matt Crawford said the site has a “difficult history,” but added “the landmarks commission hasn’t really shied away from those stories.”
The nitty gritty? Permanent landmark designation — if approved by the City Council next year — would make 30 N. LaSalle eligible for a 12-year $47 million real estate tax reduction under the Cook County’s Class L program aimed at restoring historic properties, city planner Eiliesh Tuffy said.
Those tax savings — plus $57 million in tax increment financing — help sweeten the pot for Golub Real Estate Corp., which is undertaking a $135 million plan to convert 30 N. LaSalle to residences as part of the city’s LaSalle Corridor Revitalization program.
“It’s ironic,” architect John Vinci, who was among those who fought to save the Chicago Stock Exchange Building from demolition. “Here is one of the great buildings, and we couldn’t save it. And yet … we’re saving some mediocre building now.”
Sullivan’s best gets the worst
Built in 1894, the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, with its undulating bay windows, magnificently arched ornamental entrance and a cornice as crisp and prominent as a hat brim, was among Louis Sullivan and partner Dankmar Adler’s finest work.
It’s double-height trading room was a treasure of details, including wall stenciling, stained glass and guided column capitals.
But by the 1960s, the building — like many other downtown architectural treasures from the late 19th century, such as Adler and Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, 64 W. Randolph St. — had fallen into disrepair and were slated for the wrecking ball.
The demolitions were backed by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was building a new downtown of gleeming skyscrapers and public plazas.
“Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has been replaced by the speculator,” the New York Times wrote in 1971.
“There was really a concerted planning effort and a concerted effort from the administration to make sure that the Loop was recovering and building in the modern [architectural] movement,” Crawford said.
For preservationists, the Chicago Stock Exchange Building was a line in the sand. They picketed, protested and lobbied to save the structure.
For a while, it worked. Daley held up demolition and ordered a study that would determine if it were financially feasible to save the building. The study’s findings: No.
Meanwhile, Chicago architecture firms refused to design a new building on the site, prompting its developers to reach out to Dallas architect Thomas Stanley.
“They were those guys who could turn out a kind of modernist-looking building that probably looked pretty good in the renderings [and were] cheap to build,” architect Thomas Leslie, author of “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City,” said.
While the Chicago Stock Exchange Building was being demolished, photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel and his comrades, including Vinci, spent months salvaging ornament, including the trading room floor, from the doomed building.
Nickel was killed in 1972 when a portion of the building collapsed on him during demolition.
The trading floor was rebuilt inside the Art Institute of Chicago, while the historic arch sits outside of the museum at Monroe Street and Columbus Drive.
And irony doubles down: The current 30 N. LaSalle stands to benefit from landmark protections, and ordinances were strengthened as a result of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building’s demolition.
Here’s the deal
The LaSalle Street Corridor needs reviving, and the city is smart to put its purse behind this effort.
Five other LaSalle Street Corridor projects have been landmarked and are taking advantage of the Class L property tax incentive.
But these structures such as the Art Deco-designed Field Building, 135 S. LaSalle St., or the Harris Trust & Savings Bank, 111 W. Monroe St. — a nicely-paired 1911 neo-classical skyscraper and a sleek modernist tower from 1960 — would be worthy of landmark status, whether they were built in the corridor or not.
The 30 N. LaSalle project would provide 349 studio, one- and two-bedroom units, with 30% of them being affordable units. That’s admirable.
But no way would an architectural cypher like 30 N. LaSalle find itself eligible for landmark status were it not for the need to make the Golub deal’s financials work out better.
Especially since, the project won’t change (read: improve) the building’s double-drab exterior.
“It’s got very little presence,” Leslie said of 30 N. LaSalle. “Especially now with the busway on Washington, it’s even more of a background building. Even when you’re across the street, you don’t see it. So it is a funny one.”