Blog

By Ellen Shubart, Class of  2007

Recently I was asked to give a presentation on the Jewelers Building at 35 E. Wacker Drive. After doing some research, I found that despite its name, the building was never home to many jewelers!

After its 1909 publication, a number of recommendations from Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago were acted upon without delay. Construction of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, linking Michigan Avenue and the central business district with the city’s north side, was front and center. The two-level trunnion bascule bridge opened on May 14, 1920. The adjoining bilevel Wacker Drive opened in October of 1926. These new additions to the cityscape allowed Michigan Avenue to develop hand-in-hand with Wacker Drive.

Among the many developers seizing the opportunity to build in this new area were Wallace Clark and his partner, J. Milton Trainer. Their firm, Clark and Trainer Co., was at the forefront of the Michigan-Wacker development, developing the 21-story 30 North Michigan and arranging the purchase of land for the Tribune Tower.  35 East Wacker, later to be known as the Jewelers Building, was Wallace Clark’s vision for the new riverfront location.

The architectural firms of Giaver and Dinkelberg and Thielbar and Fugard were selected to design the building. They planned a 17-story tower rising from a 24-story base, ornamented in the historic Beaux Arts tradition, and clad in terra cotta. The building was topped with a 40-ft. high glass-filled dome, called a belvedere, that first served as a sightseeing observatory. (Later it was enclosed and became a restaurant/speakeasy called Stratosphere, where Al Capone reportedly drank.) At 40 stories, 35 East was the tallest structure west of New York City when it was completed in 1926. And it was the first downtown Chicago office tower building with indoor parking.

The desire for a  building aimed at the jewelry trade was Clark’s. He hoped to fill his building with watch, clock, and diamond merchants, named it the Jewelers Building, and put the initials JB on the building. In a flyer for potential tenants, Clark touted  the garage as “An Unusual Convenience.” He noted that, “Not satisfied to create a structure singular for its beauty and utility as an office building, the planners of the Jewelers Building have also kept in mind downtown Chicago’s most acute problem – parking space for the automobile.” The high-rise garage with car lifts was the first of its kind in the United States. Elevators brought tenants’ cars and delivery vehicles from lower Wacker Drive directly to the desired floor – up to the 28th. The section of the building ordinarily devoted to a light court, the brochure noted, became the garage. Entrance was through a private “subway” off Wabash Avenue and exits were through Holden Court.

Despite the security of an indoor parking structure that delivered a tenant and his car from the street to his office – designed specifically for fearful jewelers who wouldn’t want to walk around with lose gems in their pockets – the jewelry trade did not gravitate to the building.  By 1940, the garage has been converted into office space and since that time, the one remaining automobile elevator  has been used for freight.

Miles Berger reports in They Built Chicago: Entrepreneurs Who Shaped A Great City’s Architecture, “the jewelry trade did not come as Clark had hoped.” Instead, the Pure Oil Company of Cleveland arrived. In 1926, Pure Oil signed a long-term lease, heralded as “the second largest office lease ever negotiated” in Chicago, for floors 18-23. The building was quickly renamed the Pure Oil Building. In 1962, Pure Oil moved to suburban Palatine, and the building was renamed again, this time as the 35 E. Wacker Building.

Jewelers Building? Probably not a great name for a building that housed a long-forgotten oil company. But it’s a fun story about how a building was named for a dream rather than reality.