Dearborn Street

Dearborn Street features some of Chicago’s finest architecture, art, and urban design from the late 19th century through the 1960s, including work by Chicago School architects William LeBaron Jenney, Burnham & Root, and Holabird & Roche, and modern architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, C.F. Murphy, and Perkins and Will. Sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Calder line the street in plazas that serve as outdoor spaces for performances, fairs, markets, civic celebrations, and political events. At the south end, an important group of 1890s skyscrapers stands beside the century-old elevated train structure in Printer’s Row, once the center of the city’s printing industry. The street also reflects Chicago’s architectural leadership in the 1960s through the Federal Center, the Richard J. Daley Center, and the Brunswick Building. Dearborn Street was also associated with Governor John Peter Altgeld, whose 1896 pardon of the Haymarket riot labor agitators destroyed his political career, and in more recent times with Gallery 37, Skate on State, rallies, sports celebrations, and noon-time concerts. Its banking, business, and government life continues amid major art, architecture, and year-round cultural and civic activity. Along Dearborn Street, the Monadnock Building, with its north half built in 1889-1891 by Burnham & Root and south half built in 1891-1893 by Holabird & Roche, joins a load-bearing masonry skyscraper of exceptional height and thick six-foot walls with a later steel-frame section that has thinner walls and classically inspired ornament. The Fisher Building, built in 1896 by D.H. Burnham and Co. with principal architect Charles Atwood and expanded in 1907 by Peter Weber, is distinguished by terra cotta fish and other aquatic forms, tall windows, and increasingly elaborate gothic detailing that linked the soaring new skyscraper to the Gothic cathedral.

Chicago, Illinois · United States