The Chicago Daily News building opened 97 years ago, helping to establish the city as a center for media and architecture.
Although the Daily News moved out of the 26-story, steel-framed riverfront building in 1960, its importance never diminished.
Last week, the Chicago City Council designated the Art Deco skyscraper at 2 N. Riverside Plaza as an official Chicago landmark.
“It’s a building that was incredibly important for a number of reasons: architecturally but also urbanistically and culturally to the city. Because of where it is and what is across the river from it, it never really has received the kind of star treatment that it deserves,” Thomas Leslie, the Ralph E. Johnson Professor of Design at the Illinois School of Architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said today. “It’s great to see it getting landmarked and probably long overdue.”
According to the city, the Near West Side building is undergoing a nearly $70 million commercial rehabilitation by the owner, 2 N Riverside Owner LLC.
The building, designed by Holabird & Root, was completed in 1929. It was the first office building in the city built above railroad tracks and the first with a public plaza.
Leslie said the landmark designation is due not only to the building’s importance to the journalism industry in Chicago but also its design.
“It’s a really important piece of urbanism. It was one of the first buildings in the city to face the river, which for a long time had just been an industrial sewer. It’s an important piece of the downtown landscape in that it’s a building that really does try to connect the city with the riverfront, and that’s a tradition that goes on today,” Leslie said.
Design and engineering praised
The building’s design is considered Art Deco, though Leslie prefers “streamlined moderne.”
“It’s a style that was very much kind of looking to both classical architecture but also to modernism. A lot of the ornament is really stripped down and abstracted,” Leslie said. “It shows that kind of moment where architectural tastes were really changing. It opens up this beautiful plaza to the riverfront.”
The structure also is a marvel of structural engineering, Leslie said.
“It was built on top of the active rail yards that were west of the Loop, and the structure is literally woven down through the tracks which were existing at the time. You can’t see any of that steelwork but it held up all of the newspaper’s printing presses, literally suspended over the tracks when it opened,” Leslie said. “It’s really an important landmark for its engineering prowess, in addition to its style. This is a building that encapsulates so much about what the city is all about, how the city relates to the river, its history with writing, with journalism, and then also, if you look really closely, its really long history with structural engineering.”
The Daily News was founded in 1875 by Melville Stone. Under the leadership of publisher Victor Lawson, it earned a reputation for journalistic integrity and innovation.
Lawson died in 1925, four years before the Daily News moved into its new building. The newspaper was home to such journalism luminaries as Eugene Field, Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Peter Lisagor, and Mike Royko. The paper pioneered foreign news services. It was the first Chicago newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize and over the years won 13 in all. It also established radio station WMAQ in 1922, then sold it to NBC in 1931.
The end of the Daily News
In 1959, the Daily News was purchased by the Chicago Sun-Times, and Daily News staffers moved into the Sun-Times’ building at 401 N. Wabash Ave. That building was demolished 2004; the site is now home to Trump Tower.
Former Chicago Sun-Times reporter and editor Scott Fornek got his start in 1977 as a Daily News copy boy at the Wabash building. By then, the Daily News, an afternoon paper, was nearing its end.
“I worked less than six months for the Daily News and then I was out of work for a while. Then in the summer of 1978, I was rehired by the Sun-Times,” said Fornek, 67, who retired last year.
Though he never worked in the Riverside Plaza building, Fornek said its landmark status is well-deserved.
“I think it’s a good thing. Chicago is a great newspaper town. It’s still a great journalism town but in the days of newspapers, it was a great newspaper town,” Fornek said.
“There was a time when there were like six or seven papers, morning and daily papers. The Daily News was part of that history.”
Ward Miller, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Chicago, said the designation for the building is the result of a nearly 20-year effort.
“The old Chicago Daily News building was one of our most endangered buildings,” Miller said. “We’re hoping that this landmark designation really does bring a spotlight to this building, that it protects it in perpetuity and it encourages a reinvestment in this structure.”
Michael Puente is a reporter and anchor for WBEZ. Reach him at mpuente@wbez.org.