A Century on LaSalle

Before the canyon of banks, before the bronze doors and the marble, LaSalle Street was mud. Chicago in the 1830s was a speculation more than a city, a few thousand people betting that a swampy portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin would become the crossroads of a continent. They were right faster than anyone expected.

The street took its name from the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who had paddled through the region a century and a half earlier looking for a route to the Gulf. By the 1850s the route he imagined existed in iron and water. Grain elevators shouldered up along the river; schooners and steamers stacked three deep at the docks; and Chicago was suddenly moving more grain than any city on earth.

LaSalle Street found its calling early. The Chicago Board of Trade organized in 1848, the year the canal opened, and the financiers clustered near it. A pattern was set that would hold for the next century and a half: this street would be where Chicago kept its ledgers.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 announced Chicago to the planet, and the decades that followed built the city's second skyline, the one you can still trace in old photographs: Tribune Tower's gothic crown, the Wrigley Building gleaming white over the river, the Jewelers' Building topped with its dome. Down on LaSalle, the transformation was less romantic and more consequential. Block by block, the street walled itself in with banks, exchanges, and law offices until it became a canyon in the literal sense, a slot of sky between cliffs of stone.

This was the financial heart of the Midwest, the place where harvests from a thousand miles of prairie were priced, insured, financed, and argued over. The corner of LaSalle and Adams sat in the thick of it. Fortunes moved through these blocks on paper and handshakes, and the buildings were designed to make that trust visible: heavy stone, tall bronze doors, lobbies meant to feel like the inside of a promise.

Postwar Chicago traded stone for steel and glass. Mies van der Rohe's towers made the city the world capital of modernism, and for forty years the new buildings got taller, cooler, and more abstract. The Loop's Victorian survivors thinned out; the beloved Masonic Temple had already come down in 1939, its gabled crown reduced to memory and photographs.

LaSalle Street held steadier than most. The banks stayed. The traders stayed. But by the 1980s something had shifted in architecture itself. A generation raised on glass boxes began asking what had been lost, and the answer, increasingly, was buildings like the ones Burnham and Root used to make: buildings with warmth, ornament, and a sense of belonging to their street. The corner of LaSalle and Adams was about to get exactly that.

From the beginning, the top of 190 South LaSalle was set apart. The 40th floor, up under the gabled crown, became home to a working law library: two stories of book-lined mezzanines, iron-railed stacks, and a grand hall lit by an arched cathedral window with the whole city beyond it. For decades it was one of downtown's best-kept secrets, a room of chandeliers and ten thousand bound volumes floating above the financial canyon, seen mostly by attorneys who worked late.

Today that room is The Library at 190. The books remain. So do the stacks, the brass elevator doors, the checkerboard marble, and the view. What changed is who gets to stand in it. Weddings come up the historic elevators now. First dances happen under the chandeliers. Toasts echo off shelves that once held case law, the room where a city kept its arguments has become a room where people make their promises.

A century and a half of Chicago is stacked beneath this floor. The next chapter is yours to write.