Chicago Style

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #169

This is a block in Chicago’s urban core, on State Street, in the Loop:

We’re looking specifically at the block with the three buildings: a two- or three-story retail building on the left, an asymmetrical tall building, and then a plainer looking tall building.

This looks like a lot of old blocks in older cities. The block I used to work on in D.C. kind of looked like this. One building was historic; the other two that used to abut it were newer, but they still formed a coherent urban block. It wouldn’t surprise you that something else once stood where the low-rise retail building is today. Almost any time you see a low-rise building, or especially a parking lot mixed in with big, tall, distinctly urban buildings, you’re looking at a hole in an old streetscape.

Here is the block many decades ago, thanks to a tweet from a Chicago urbanist:

It’s a shame that the lovely building on the left—demolished in 1959, in a period when a lot of late-19th-century buildings came down in the old cities—is gone. The building on the right survives pretty much exactly as it was.

What’s quite curious, though, is the building in the middle. It’s still standing, but it’s been altered in a very odd way! Look closely:

Somehow, several stories have been shaved off of the left side! Notice that it looks like even the back half lost those stories somehow, meaning—as far as I can tell—that the left side of the structure has been completely rebuilt, with even the matching left-wall windows being new, since previously all of that was a party wall. It kind of looks to me like the missing stories begin where this center building abutted the old tall building on the left. So perhaps it was damaged in the 1959 demolition?

Here’s a sort of top-down view. You can see the building has a lot of shape, which it doesn’t look like it did originally, though we can’t see the back in that old illustration. Also, the brick wall you can see on the side is probably left over from the demolished building.

Stuff like this is really curious to me. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible to do that kind of surgery on a big tall building without compromising the structure in some way. But if you look at enough old photos and histories, you’ll actually see it’s not that rare for buildings to lose a few stories or otherwise be altered in strange ways but remain standing. Check out the middle “Related Reading” link for a particularly weird example in Washington, D.C.

It’s cool, though, that this Chicago block still looks like a city block, as, in a location like this, it should.

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Related Reading:

Last Wall Standing

A D.C. Building Mystery

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8

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