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By Bob Pratt, Class of 2019

It was to be the world’s tallest building, a dramatically soaring limestone-clad 75-story tower occupying two square blocks, to be constructed on air rights over Illinois Central tracks on East Wacker Drive just east of the CAC’s present home. No, this was not part of the late-1960s Illinois Center planned development. Plans for the Apparel Mart were announced some 40 years earlier, in June, 1928, at the height of the late-1920s development boom.

Fifteen stories taller than Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in New York, the Apparel Mart would be a 3.5 million square-foot multipurpose complex featuring office space in the tower and lower-floor showroom space for apparel vendors.  Included within its grand vision: access to rail transportation beneath the building, a 440-room hotel, an automated 1,000+car garage, professional club quarters, and a rooftop swimming pool.  Thirty elevators in five banks would serve the tower portion of the building, eliminating any need to change elevators. Total construction cost was estimated to be $45 million (forty years later, CAC’s One Illinois Center cost only $30 million).

The building was designed by the young and ambitious Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager, then 41, whose most prominent projects to date were the massive and ornate Roxy Theatre in New York (1927), the Peabody Hotel in Memphis (1926), and the not-yet-completed Medinah Athletic Club on Michigan Avenue. The general contractor was the prolific New York-based Starrett Brothers, that would soon build the Empire State Building.

Ahlschlager became the project’s chief public-facing advocate, authoring a lengthy front-page article in the Sunday New York Times on October 7, 1928. The article extolled the virtues of increasingly larger and taller buildings generally, and specifically the attractions of what had been re-named the Chicago Tower and Apparel Manufacturers’ Mart.  But that article included hints that, four months after the initial announcement, things were not going smoothly. Ahlschlager effectively admitted that below-market rental rates for both “mart” and office space were being offered, characterizing the low rent as a by-product of economies of scale, rather than leasing disappointments.

Construction did not begin as planned in early 1929, and when the project re-emerged in May, 1929, it had been moved and re-named. The Chicago Tribune cryptically explained that demand for office space had proven to exceed demand for mart space. The Crane Tower, an office building with anchor tenants Illinois Central Railroad and Crane Co., would be built on Randolph Drive where the Aon Building is now situated, an air-rights development with rail access. Touted as “taller than the Eiffel Tower,” it would have the same 75 stories, and a height (with beacon spire) of 1,022 feet. Crane Tower would be the world’s first “supertall,” preceding the term itself.

Details of the project’s failure are scarce, other than its spectacularly poor timing, combined with its massive scale.  Ahlschlager had predicted that the “many advantages” of the Illinois Central air rights location would make his proposed structure “only one of the many structures of different kinds and types to be erected in that section of the city.” But it was not until more than 25 years later that the Prudential Building became the location’s first air-rights development, and some 40 years later that the Illinois Center planned development was approved.

This would not be the end for Ahlschlager, whose relationship with Starrett Brothers and its related development arm had created a backlog of projects. Stay tuned for the “rest of the story.”