State Street

State Street became Chicago’s major retail thoroughfare after Potter Palmer turned a narrow, unpaved street of small shops into a shopping district by acquiring land along it and persuading Field and Leiter to open its first major department store at State and Washington Streets. By 1870 it was Chicago’s shopping destination, and despite the delay caused by the Chicago Fire of 1871, by the 1890s it held the city’s finest retail establishments, with more prestigious stores at the north end and more popular variety stores at the south end. Its importance grew further when Chicago’s first subway system opened beneath State Street in 1943 and linked station mezzanines directly to the basements of many department stores. State Street also became a showcase of Chicago architecture, lined with buildings by William Le Baron Jenney and architects associated with him, including Louis Sullivan, William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Daniel Burnham. In a city hemmed in by Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and railroad yards, these designers developed the skyscraper and the Chicago School of Architecture between 1880 and 1910, using steel-frame construction, plate glass, elevators, and fireproofing to create tall commercial buildings with gridlike exteriors, broad open floors, and restrained ornament. Among the notable buildings on and near the street are Jenney’s Second Leiter Building of 1891, Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer Store building begun in 1899 and occupied by Carson’s from 1904, the Reliance Building by Burnham and Root, the Chicago Building by Holabird and Roche, the 1921 Chicago Theatre by Rapp and Rapp, the Mentor Building by Howard Van Doren Shaw, and the current Palmer House Hilton, a reminder of Palmer’s role as the street’s major developer. Other important State Street buildings include the Maurice L. Rothschild Building, begun in 1906 and later expanded, the A.M. Rothschild and Co. Building of 1912, later Goldblatt’s flagship and then adapted for DePaul University and city offices, the Harold Washington Library Center of 1991, and a series of department stores and commercial structures that together reflect Chicago’s mercantile beginnings and architectural achievement.

Chicago, Illinois · United States