For residents of a certain vintage, State Street will always be Chicago’s great street. But these days, to tourists and suburbanites as well as some locals, Chicago means North Michigan Avenue. They’ve embraced it as a big-city theme park, the closest thing to a Rouse-ian festival market that the city offers. A 1989 survey of downtown pedestrian patterns found that on a typical summer Saturday the two sides of Michigan Avenue near Water Tower carried more than 53,000 and 46,000 people during a nine-hour sample period, tops among all downtown blocks surveyed.
In fact, much of North Michigan Avenue wasn’t even North Michigan Avenue until recently. Before World War I the main north-south street north of the river was Pine Street, a venue that was unpromising raw material for a cosmopolitan boulevard. The neighborhood it bisected was an unprepossessing site physically, offering no parks or hilltop vistas. The district did offer views of the lake–remember that until well into the 1880s the lakeshore ran in a more or less straight line between today’s North Pier Terminal and One Magnificent Mile–but even that advantage diminished as the shoreline was gradually pushed farther lakeward. The chief advantage of the place, then and now, was that it was close to other places, specifically the Loop on one side and Lincoln Park on the other.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The idea of a new Michigan Avenue bridge excited powerful allies, including the Tribune and the Chicago Real Estate Board. Such a scheme was approved in 1905 by the City Council, and it surfaced again in 1906 in Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan. It was Burnham who combined a variety of ideas into the North Michigan Avenue that we recognize today–a widened street carried on ramps culminating at the river in a new two-level drawbridge flanked by small plazas.
The opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920 made North Michigan physically accessible. But the establishments that opened along the new avenue maintained their social exclusivity. The avenue became the home to the city’s private clubs and expensive hotels–not the tourist warrens being built near the train stations to the south but select residential hotels where the rich might sojourn while in the city away from their suburban estates. Posh apartments (some with as many as a dozen rooms) followed. And like every neighborhood, the avenue needed and got convenience shopping. From the start it was decreed that each building would have shops on its lower floors–generally boutique-scale retailers who catered to more select tastes than could be satisfied by the mass merchandisers on State Street.
Ordinarily, profitable uses on a street tend to concentrate to the point where they drive out other uses; as the street’s economy grows less diverse, eventually it, like any too-specialized organism, becomes prey to unexpected changes in its environment. That’s what happened to State Street when the car came. In lesser ways it happened to North Michigan, too. The avenue for a time had a certain bohemian character. Parts of the district (the area known generally as River North today) were home to warehouses and town houses and converted stables of the type that have always attracted artists, book dealers, and others. Stamper tells us that the late Michigan-Superior Building at 737 North and the surviving Michigan-Chestnut Building at 842 North were designed to include artists’ studios. (The former was built by the family that owned the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan.) But real artists couldn’t afford the rents even in the late 1920s, and those spaces were converted to rentable offices.
Developers were quick to see the possibilities. The intersection is home to one of the nation’s more famous urban ensembles. Its standout buildings are the Tribune Tower (finished in 1925) and the Wrigley buildings (1922). The former was never as bad a building as some of its critics contended, if not as good as what could have been built; the Wrigley buildings are a rare instance of buildings that are admired by both the untutored public and the cognoscenti. The other members of that quartet are not as well known, less because they are inferior architecturally than because they were not so exploited by corporate image-mongerers. The neoclassical London Guarantee and Accident Building opened in 1924 on the southwest corner of the bridge; four years later, Holabird and Roche’s forward-looking 333 North Michigan rose opposite it.
Attempts to restrict building height along the new avenue were doomed to frustration. The city adopted a new zoning law in 1923 that allowed very much taller buildings than those recommended by either Burnham or the property owners’ association. With no mechanism to enforce their aesthetic injunctions, the association watched as renegade owners adorned the upper avenue with buildings of 16, 17, 25, 37, and 41 stories that stood incongruously next to buildings a quarter their size.
