Merchandise Mart


The Merchandise Mart is a commercial building in downtown Chicago, Illinois. When it opened in 1930, it was the world's largest building, with of floor space. The Art Deco structure is at the junction of the Chicago River's branches. The building is a leading retailing and wholesale location, hosting 20,000 visitors and tenants daily in the late 2000s.
Built by Marshall Field & Co. and later owned for over half a century by the Kennedy family, the Mart centralizes Chicago's wholesale goods industry by consolidating architectural and interior design vendors and trades under a single roof. It has become home to several other enterprises, including the Shops at the Mart, the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Art, Motorola Mobility, the Grainger Technology Group branch of W.W. Grainger, and the Chicago tech startup center 1871. It was sold in January 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust.
The Merchandise Mart is so large that it had its own ZIP Code until 2008, when the Postal Service assigned the ZIP Code to part of the surrounding area. In 2010, the building opened its Design Center showrooms to the public.

History

Construction and context

In 1926, a westward extension of double-deck Wacker Drive increased development on the south riverbank. In 1927, Marshall Field & Co. announced its plans to build on the north bank opposite Wacker Drive. The site, bordered by Orleans Street, Wells Street, Kinzie Street, and the Chicago River, was formerly a Native American trading post and the site of Chicago and North Western Railway's former Wells Street Station, abandoned in 1911 in favor of the Chicago and North Western Passenger Terminal. With the railroad's air rights, the site was large enough to accommodate "the largest building in the world". Removing the train yard supported the Chicago Plan Commission's desire to develop and beautify the riverfront.
James Simpson, president of Marshall Field & Co. from 1923 to 1930 and chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission from 1926 to 1935, turned the first shovels of dirt at groundbreaking on August 16, 1928, along with architect Ernest Graham. General contractor John W. Griffiths & Sons brought building construction into the Machine Age through the use of techniques "ordinarily used in the construction of big dams."
Cement arriving by boat was lifted by compressed air to bins above the ground, with gravel and sand delivered by railroad cars to conveyor belts and transfer elevators. Giant mixers provided wet concrete to skip hoists in vertical towers that were extended as the building rose. Continuously employing 2,500 men and as many as 5,700 men altogether, the construction project lasted a year and a half into the early months of the Great Depression.
With a foundation footprint of nearly two square city blocks, the building required 29 million bricks, of plumbing, of wiring, nearly of concrete, of stone, and 4,000 windows. Bethlehem Steel fabricated much of the 60,000 tons of steel. An estimated of corridors and over 30 elevators were included in the construction. The total cost was estimated at $26 million.

Ownership

The Merchandise Mart opened on May 5, 1930, just east of Chicago's original trading post, Wolf Point.
The building realized Marshall Field’s dream of a single wholesale center for the nation and consolidated 13 different warehouses. It was purchased in 1945 or 1946 by the Kennedy family through Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc., and managed by Sargent Shriver. Kennedy's purchase price was reported to be either $12.5 or $13 million, and it is said that his initial capital was $1 million, though records say his original mortgage was $12.5 million, roughly half of what it had cost to construct the complex.
E. Stanley Klein, a good friend of Marshall Field and Joseph Kennedy, brokered the building's sale. At the time Klein was a partner of Field and together they started Fieldcrest Mills. Klein maintained that Kennedy's bargain price was predicated on an oral agreement between Field and Kennedy that after the sale the building would be donated to the University of Chicago and that Kennedy would take the tax deduction. No documentary evidence of this agreement exists.
The building revenues became a principal source of Kennedy family wealth, often used for political campaign funding.
In 1998 the Kennedys sold the property to Vornado Realty Trust as part of a larger $625 million transaction. When it was sold, the Merchandise Mart was also the Kennedy family's last remaining operating business. That year, Vornado acquired MMPI for $450 million cash and a $100 million-plus stake in Vornado. As of 2007, the building was valued at $917 million.

Expansions and renovations

The Merchandise Mart was modernized in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1961 the Indian chiefs were removed and replaced with concrete plates, of minimal note to onlookers as skyscrapers did not rise on the north side of the river as predicted. In 2014, some of the carvings were found in a suburban backyard and auctioned. In 1962, an entrance canopy was constructed over the south for vehicle use.
In 1977, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the Chicago Apparel Center, on the west side of Orleans Street, which increased the Merchandise Mart’s total floor space to. Plazas, esplanades, and overlooks employed the waterfront location for pedestrian use. In 1988, Helmut Jahn designed an enclosed pedestrian walking bridge over Orleans Street connecting the Mart and the Apparel Center.
After a 10-year, $100 million modernization in the late 1980s that included public utility upgrades, Beyer Blinder Belle's commission in 1989 was to create additional perimeter entrances and restore the display windows, main entrance, and lobby. On the south facade, the drive-through canopy was removed and two smaller doorways aside the main entrance added. Display windows, painted over during the earlier modernization campaign, were restored with clear glass to showcase merchants' wares.
New main and corner entrances were added to the rear facade, and the loading dock that occupied the north portion of the first floor of the river level was removed in order to use the bottom deck of North Bank Drive. Improvements to the lobby included restoration of the original glass curtain wall over the entrance, shop fronts, and reception desk using terrazzo floors and wall sconces influenced by the original design. The project was completed in 1991.
In 2007, the building received LEED for Existing Buildings Silver recognition.

Building

The Merchandise Mart was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White to be a "city within a city". Second only to Holabird & Root in Chicago art deco architecture, the firm had a long-standing relationship with the Field family. Started in 1928, completed in 1931, and built in the same art deco style as the Chicago Board of Trade Building, its cost was reported as both $32 million and $38 million. The building was the largest in the world in terms of floorspace, but was surpassed by the Pentagon in 1943, and now stands forty-fourth on the list of largest buildings in the world. Once the largest commercial space in the world, New Century Global Center in China is now recognized by Guinness World Records as holding the record.

Architecture

Designer Alfred Shaw integrated art deco stylings with influences from three building types—the warehouse, the department store and the skyscraper. A warehouse block stands as the 18-story bulk of the building. Ribbon piers define the windows, and the building's chamfered corners, minimal setbacks, and corner pavilions disguise the edges of the mass and visually reduce bulk.
The south corner pavilions are of greater height than the north corner pavilions. The building is open at the pedestrian level with bronzed framed display windows, typical of a department store, on the south, west and east boundaries. The 25-story central tower ascends with a peak in the form of a skyscraper, and rests in the southern half of the building. Deeply recessed portals occur between raised panels, and are adorned with medallions featuring the interlocked initials of the Merchandise Mart. The same logo occurs throughout the building. Fifty-six American Indian chiefs circled the tower's crown, a reference to the site's history and Chicago's early trade activities. Three and a half feet wide by seven feet tall, the terra cotta figures were barely visible from the street, meant to be viewed from the upper floors of the skyscrapers planned to rise along the riverbank.
The lobby of The Merchandise Mart is defined by eight square marble piers, with storefronts in side aisles framed in embossed bronze trim. The green and orange terrazzo floor was conceived as a carpet: a pattern of squares and stripes bordered by overscaled chevrons inlaid with The Mart's initials. The chevron theme is continued in the column sconces lighting an ornamented cornice overhead.
Referred to as "business boulevards", two wide long corridors with terrazzo floors in the upper levels featured six and one-half miles of display windows. Building regulations specified identical entrances along corridors but tenants could personalize the individual floor space. Excepting the corridors, elevator halls, and exhibition space on the fourth floor, the of each upper floor was "raw space" with concrete floors.

Artwork

's frieze of 17 murals is the primary feature of the lobby and graphically illustrate commerce throughout the world, including the countries of origin for items sold in the building. The murals depict the industries and products, the primary mode of transportation and the architecture of 14 countries. Drawing on years as a stage set designer, Guerin executed the murals in red with gold leaf using techniques producing distinct image layers in successive planes. In a panel representing Italy, Venetian glassware appears in the foreground with fishing boats moored on the Grand Canal and the facade of the Palazzo Ducale rises above the towers of the Piazza San Marco.
"To immortalize outstanding American merchants", Joseph Kennedy in 1953 commissioned eight bronze busts, four times life size, which would come to be known as the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame:
All of the busts rest on white pedestals lining the Chicago River and face north toward the gold front door of the building.