Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington Street
Chicago, IL 60602
When I was discharged last month, losing my position because of a general retrenchment, never shall I forget the scenes at the Public Library when with scores of others I sought the protection of its sheltering walls at early morning to thaw the night’s coldness out of my half-frozen body, and search the papers for a possible chance of employment.
Dr. Ethel Lynn’s The Adventures of a Woman Hobo, “Writing from Chicago” on April 18, 1908.
The public phones in the Public Library were always busy. In the old restrooms fluids pooled on the cracked terrazzo, and the homeless hung around inside, smoking, sometimes washing out their clothes in the plugged sinks. Even on the brightest days I began to notice the gray, gloomy cast of the marble corridors and flights of stairs. The reading rooms, dominated by the glow of green-shaded desk lamps, seemed worn as old railroad stations. There was a smell of musty pulp, of thumbed cloth covers, of too much print. At the long reading tables I could spot the displaced and dispossessed drowsing over enormous tomes or reading aloud to themselves as if engaged in debates with the complete works of Marx and Engels, Spengler, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, while outside the windows cooing pigeons paced back and forth along the crusted slate ledges.
Stuart Dybek’s “Nighthawks,” 1981.
The Chicago Cultural Center officially opened in 1977, but the building’s history started a century prior. People around the world offered aide in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire’s destruction, including, two months after, a group led by London citizen A.H. Burgess. With the support of prominent people like Thomas Hughes, Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson, Burgess proposed that the English give Chicago some 8,000 books to replenish some of the books lost to the fire. He told the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 7, 1871, “I propose that England should present a Free Library to Chicago, to remain there as a mark of sympathy now, and a keepsake and a token of true brotherly kindness forever…” Until then, private libraries in Chicago required membership fees; there were no public libraries. The proposed English book donation led to a public meeting, which led to passage of the Illinois Library Act of 1872, which authorized cities to establish tax-supported libraries throughout the state.
The books were first stored in a recommissioned water tank, and they were relocated four times in the 24 years that followed. On January 1, 1872, the Chicago Public Library opened its doors at the southeast corner of LaSalle and Adams streets in that circular water tank that survived the fire. Finally, from 1893 to 1897, the Chicago Public Library (now the Chicago Cultural Center) was constructed to house the book collection. Boston architectural firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge designed the building, mostly in the neoclassical style. The cost was nearly $2 million (equivalent to more than $73 million today). It is capped with two stained-glass domes, set symmetrically atop the two wings. Many of these original books remain available to public viewing at the Harold Washington Library’s special collections.
For 80 years after its construction, this building served as the main branch of the Chicago Public Library. Throughout that time, it served as a refuge for a variety of visitors, earning the nickname “the People’s Palace.” Dr. Ethel Lynn and Stuart Dybek, nearly 75 years apart, both wrote about the old main library as a refuge for Chicago people living on the margins of society. Dybek, a Chicago writer of Polish descent, was raised in Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in 1950s and 1960s.
In several interviews, George Saunders, who grew up on Chicago’s Southwest Side, in Oak Forest, mentions how he first read Dybek in the Cultural Center when it was the old library, an essential moment in his writing origin story. In a September 1, 2022 interview with Terra Dankowski in American Libraries Magazine, Saunders says,
When I was in my 20s, I was floundering. I was living with my aunt, doing roofing jobs, and trying to be a writer but hadn’t read enough contemporary fiction. Every time I read I would just want to read Hemingway again. I don’t know what compelled me to do this, but I took the train downtown to [CPL’s main library], in the middle of the day in my roofing clothes, and I had a mission in mind to see if there was anything new that I needed to know. And that day there was a beautifully stocked shelf of literary journals. I got about 15 of these journals that I had never heard of—I had never seen them in a bookstore—and just piled these books on the table and started reading. I hit a story by Stuart Dybeck, “Hot Ice,” and instantly recognized the syntax and the diction of the South Side, where I was from. He was talking about neighborhoods the way that we talked about them. I thought, “Oh my God, you can do this?” My face got so hot and red. “Oh, you stupid idiot. What have you been doing all these years?”
The point is, I could have gone into a million bookstores and probably would have never found that story, and I couldn’t afford to buy 15 journals. The library—democratization—let me, a roofer with $8 in my pocket, sit down and get a quick snapshot of contemporary American literature, and it changed my life.
Saunders was born on December 2, 1958, so this recollection can be placed just prior to the building’s major overhaul. In 1977, the building underwent extensive renovations and was repurposed as the Chicago Cultural Center. The CPL moved its central library to the Mandel Building at 425 North Michigan Avenue, with much of the library's collection going into storage. A debate on a new central library location continued throughout most of the 1980s, but lack of funding persistently derailed action. Upon his election in 1983, Mayor Harold Washington declared support for the construction; three years later, the city floated a $175 million bond and picked a location. In 1991, the main branch of the Chicago Public Library broke ground at Congress and State, as the Harold Washington Library Center.
The Cultural Center now exhibits a wide variety of arts, from painting and sculpture to music and dance, but its history as a library is still evident in its design. The luminous Preston Bradley Hall features the names of several great writers like Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Exhibit Hall bears a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.”
Preston Bradley Hall is capped by the 38-foot, J.A. Holtzer-designed Tiffany glass dome, the largest of its kind in the world. This is where the library’s reference hall was. The book elevator in the corner, which was used to bring books up from storage, is a vestige of the past. The beautiful décor was supposed to inspire exploration of the vast human experience in the library. The Voltaire quote says, “Men are equal; it is not birth but worth that makes the difference.”
In 2017, renowned Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall completed his mural Rushmore. Visible from Garland Court, the mural covers the western face of the building and pays homage to 20 female trailblazers in Chicago’s history. It includes Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inductees Gwendolyn Brooks (inaugural class, 2010), Margaret Burroughs (2015), and Harriet Monroe (2011), as well as Fuller Award recipients Sandra Cisneros (2021) and Jackie Taylor (2025). It also includes Oprah Winfrey, whose Book Club made the careers of many authors, and Achy Obejas, who served on our inaugural selection committee. Marshall said of his project, “I thought, well, in the history of monuments you have very few that represent women, but in the history of Chicago you have very many women that played key roles in establishing culture here.” Marshall described his work as an act of “civic obligation,” accepting only a $1 fee from the city.
For 19 years, the Cultural Center hosted events for the Story Week Festival of Writers, including Chicago Classics with Rick Kogan. Under Preston Bradley Hall’s beautiful glass dome, readers honored Chicago literature by presenting passages from their favorite Chicago books. The Cultural Center routinely hosts visits from various authors, such as Dybek in February 2019. On November 20, 2012, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame held its own ceremony in the Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater, inducting six new members (Jane Addams, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Carolyn Rodgers).
The Cultural Center was also the "courthouse" in the 1987 film The Untouchables. The culminating scenes take place there, including Frank Nitti's memorable fall from the roof.
