Building of the Mart

James Simpson and architect Ernest Graham tossed the first shovelful of dirt on August 16, 1928.

New techniques developed by general contractor John W. Griffiths & Sons brought building construction into the machine age. Especially innovative was a system for mixing and placing concrete, which as described, was "ordinarily used in the construction of big dams." Cement, arriving by boat, was shot by compressed air 75 feet up to mammoth bins. Gravel and sand were delivered by bottom dumping railroad cars to another bin. Conveyors and elevators transferred these ingredients to giant mixers. The wet concrete was then elevated by skip hoists in vertical towers that were extended as the building rose. The construction project, which lasted a year and a half through the first months of the Depression, employed 2,500 men through its duration and as many as 5,700 men altogether.

Graham, Anderson, Probst and White's part was determined in part by agreements made in the air rights union. The building fills the entire site, its footprint an irregular trapezoid that results from the oblique deviation of Orleans Street from the city grid. The riverfront of the building, the south facade, predominates in plan as well as elevation. Express elevators rose directly to the seventh floor, above the point where Marshall Field and Company occupied floors three to six. The linear arrangement of the elevator and service core that extends the building's entire two-block length on this side flows the linear arrangement of the tracks below. Freight elevators opened t the rear, where open stock merchandise was housed. The north facade, covered with fire escapes, held the entrance to the truck loading dock that occupied the entire rear portion of the first floor.



Designer Alfred Shaw conveyed the unique, modern concept of The Merchandise Mart with his suave Art Deco Style and integration of elements from three building types: the warehouse, the department store and the skyscraper office building. A huge, typical warehouse block comprises the 18-story bulk of the building. Repetitious, unadorned ribbon piers define the fenestration pattern. The building's chambered corners (a design element perhaps generated by the oblique angle of Orleans Street), the minimal setbacks of the roofline, and the corner pavilions serve to camouflage the edges of the basically rectilinear mass, visually reducing its weight and bulk. The functional reason given for this massing was the conception of the building as a hermetically sealed box.

The building opens up at pedestrian level where the two-story base is glazed with the overscaled display windows typical of a department store. Enframed in richly embossed bronze, the windows range along the length of the south, west and east facades.

The 25 story central tower projects and rises from the main block to reveal its affinity with the corporate skyscraper. Concentrated here was the building's program of ornamental imagery. The deeply recessed and overscaled portal stands between raised panels, above which hang octagonal medallions featuring the interlocked initials of The Merchandise Mart, a logo that recurs throughout the building and on early promotional material and stationery.

The local origins of Chicago's trade are depicted on the tower's crown. There, 56 American Indian chiefs stood head shoulder and arms above the city, proudly asserting their part in Chicago's nascent trade activities.

These terra-cotta acroteria, measuring 3.5X7 feet but barely visible from the street, were meant to be seen from the upper floors of the skyscrapers that would rise along the riverbank drives above the relatively low plateau of The Mart.
The lobby of The Merchandise Mart, in an overall palette of buff, bronze and warm tones, exemplifies the understated elegance that characterizes Shaw's later designs. Eight square marble piers, so slightly fluted that they appear to be merely striped, define the main lobby area. Side aisles are lined with shop fronts enframed in the lavishly embossed bronze trim found throughout this level. The terrazzo floor, in pale hues of green and orange, was conceived as a carpet: a lively pattern of squares and stripes bordered by overscaled chevrons inlaid with an abstraction of The Mart's initials. The chevron motif is carried out three-dimensionally in the column sconces that cast their uplight onto an ornamented cornice situated above. The crowning feature of the lobby, is Jules Guerin's frieze of murals, which complete the iconographic trilogy proposed for the building.

Description of Guerin's mural

Between the lobby and the elevator banks, the arcade that extends the length of the building provides the shops and services "normally found on the main street of almost any town." Here and on the second floor were lunch counters, cares and a restaurant as well as retail shops from clothing to candy. Services included an optician, beautician and barber as well as its own post office (and later The Mart had its own zip code).

In The Mart's upper stories, two wide 650-feet long corridors with terrazzo floors, referred to as "business boulevards" featured six and one-half miles of display windows, all uniformly designed. Building regulations called for identical entrances along the corridors; tenants could personalize the space behind. With the exception of the corridors, elevator halls; and exhibition space on the fourth floor, the vast five acres of each upper floor was "raw space" with concrete floors and a forest of structural columns nineteen and one-half feet apart. This area was limited to the tenants of The Merchandise Mart and their wholesale customers; the public was allowed access only to the retail portions of the first and second floors and exhibition space on the fourth floor.

SOURCE: A commodate the daily tenant and visitor population of 20,000 and the enormous crowds drawn by market events and trade shows, plus, the growing populations of the North Lop area at Wacker Drive and the River North neighborhood.

Beyer Blinder Belle's work included opening up the building by creating additional entrances around its perimeter and restoring the display windows, main entrance and lobby. On the south facade, they removed the drive-through canopy and cut two smaller portals on either side of the main entrance, thus utilizing the lower portions of the blank side panels. The overscaled display windows, painted over in the modernization campaign of the 60s were restored and tenant guidelines were stabled to ensure that clear glass would be used in order to reveal retail activities within,. The rear facade was renovated to include main and corner entrances, thus opening up The Mart to the north. The loading dock that occupied the north portion of the first floor was removed to the river level under the plaza, utilizing the bottom deck of the unrealized North Bank Drive.

On the interior, a restoration of the lobby included replication of the original glass curtain wall over the entrance, restoration of shop fronts and even a new version of the original reception desk. Beyer Blinder Belle's scheme included shop fronts, terrazzo floors and wall sconces inspired by the original design. Upon its completion in 1991,the first two floors of The Mart were named the "Shops at The Mart".

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