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| Eric Allix Rogers photo, courtesy Preservation Chicago |
Here's the thing. Great art museums are both amazing treasures and amoral empires. Just ask countries like Benin, or Jewish families whose ancestor's art was looted by the Nazis.
To paraphrase George Carlin, erecting massive calling-card buildings lets museums find more space to display their ever-expanding stash of stuff. Perhaps more importantly, they're a great way to rope in mega-donors, who gain far more lasting notoriety from having their names on a new wing than they ever could from even the most grandiloquent mausoleum.
Sometimes, however, unchecked ambition can tempt these esthetic empires into releasing their inner Mr. Hyde. This week, Preservation Chicago announced Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange Trading Room as one of their Seven Most Endangered places for 2026. Only hours later, The Art Institute of Chicago confirmed to Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey that they were, indeed, contemplating ridding itself of the Trading Room to make way for their wet dream of another mega-wing.
Turns out Preservation Chicago learned of this possibility a year ago, and decided not to go public with the news on the chance the museum might, by way of extended contemplation, come to its senses and let a putrid idea die a natural death. Instead, spurred by a $75 million gift last year to jump-start a new building program, it's apparently blossomed into an idée fixe.
Put simply, this is nuts. Suicidally, reputation-killing nuts.
First, some background: Adler & Sullivan's 1894 Stock Exchange was one of the greatest structures of the First Chicago School. Despite that, despite being fully rented, and being the subject of an intense preservation battle, it was cleared for demolition, destroyed in 1972, and replaced by 30 N. LaSalle, a glass tower whose only distinction was that, after opening, some of its windows started popping out and crashing to the ground. Most recently, it was used to grow vegetables.
As the bulldozers begin to circle, renowned Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel became obsessed with the keeping the memory of the building's beauty alive by salvaging as much of its striking ornament as possible. The Trading Room was a particular revelation.
"I think it is sort of like a holy room," Nickel is quoted as saving in Richard Cahan's moving biography, They All Fall Down. "The more you are in here the more you are in awe of it."
As recounted by Cahan, when the Trading Room's drop ceiling was removed, the original design was revealed for the first time since a Depression-era modernization . . .
... with the gold-leafed column capitals, leaded art glass, and carbon filiament lamps showing, the room looked like it had when it was first built.
"Why do we just save the pieces? Why don't we save the whole room?" Nickel asked.
His young co-worker - and, on this project, his boss - John Vinci thought the idea was insane, but soon came around. "I was sick and tired of saving bits and pieces."
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| image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom |
The task was Herculean. A double-height room, 100 by 75 feet, richly ornamented. Intricate, beautiful wall stenciling. Gold-leaf capitals. Hundreds of art glass skylights. The often damaged originals were carefully removed; the entire room meticulously notated.
For Richard Nickel, the Stock Exchange building brought him to the point of despair and exhaustion. Then it killed him. Early in 1972, a portion of the Trading Room collapsed and crushed him, ending his life even as it secured his legend.
The restoration and reinstallation at the Art Institute was an equally rigorous task. As team leader John Vinci told Betty J. Blum for an oral history ...
we had to recreate everything below the drop ceiling including the baseboard and wainscot.
Recreating the stencils was especially arduous, "52 distinct hues in muted tones of gold, green and yellow."
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| John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom |
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| John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom |
In another oral history with Blum, architect Walter Netsch, who designed the building that would house the Trading Room, recalled thinking, "Wouldn't it make a great trustees' room ... I received a very recriminatory comment from Mary Block saying, 'Walter do you realize there are so many colors in that room, what can I choose to wear?'" Eventually, said Netsch, "the Art Institute was happy because they have this money-making spot to rent and show off."
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| image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom |
An early champion of the project, Art Institute curator David Hanks, called the original Trading Room "a work of art as important as any work at the art museum." In 1977 the restored room was unveiled to great acclaim. Then New Yotk Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger judged it "one of the finest interiors created before the turn of the century,"
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| John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom |
Back in 1894, the shimmering beauty of the Trading Room was probably visible for only a few months before unruly use and an endless procession of insensitive retrofits trashed it. Restored and recreated, its splendor has endured, largely pristine, for just short of fifty years. The Art Institute raises the prospect of demolishing and reconstructing the Trading Room - AGAIN!!! - at some player-to-be-named-later somewhere else. Puh-leeze. The original project cost $1.5 million, back when that was real money. Who is this Daddy Warbucks waiting in the wings to repeat the process at today's prices?
If the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is to rescue their recently compromised status as an entity promiscuously designating mediocre buildings like 30 North LaSalle just so connected developers can fleece taxpayers for massive tax breaks, they need to landmark the Trading Room, the Stock Exchange arch, and, possibly, McKinlock Court. They need to be the antidote detoxing the Edward Hyde-like impulses two-facing the outwardly respectable alter ego of the civic jewel known as the Art Institute of Chicago.
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