Rookery
209 S. LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60604
(Downtown)
In their offices on the top floor of the Rookery, Daniel Burnham, forty-three, and his partner, John Root, newly forty, felt the electricity more keenly than most. They had participated in secret conversations, received certain assurances, and gone so far as to make reconnaissance forays to outlying parts of the city. They were Chicago’s leading architects: They had pioneered the erection of tall structures and designed the first building in the country ever to be called a skyscraper; every year, it seemed, some new building of theirs became the tallest in the world. When they moved into the Rookery at LaSalle and Adams, a gorgeous light-filled structure of Root’s design, they saw views of the lake and city that no one but construction workers had ever seen before. They knew, however, that today’s event had the potential to make their success so far seem meager.
Eric Larsen’s Devil in the White City
In 1885, Daniel Burnham and John Root were commissioned to design a building for the Central Safety Deposit Company on the southeast corner of LaSalle and Adams. When it was completed, it quickly became one of the tallest buildings in the world. Burnham’s top-floor offices is where the blueprint for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was drawn; Eric Larson’s Devil in the White City explores the intertwined lives of the architect and serial killer H. H. Holmes at the time of the fair. In 1909, Burnham asked Frank Lloyd Wright to update the interior public spaces of The Rookery, and he did by replacing Root’s ironwork with white Carrara marble, turning the lobby into a “gleaming white and gold center of commerce.” Frank Norris’ The Pit enacts The Rookery as the site of the office of character Curtis Jadwin; the 1987 film The Untouchables features it as the police headquarters of main character Elliot Ness; and Home Alone 2 has the building’s exterior depicted as Duncan’s Toy Chest.
It's the oldest standing high-rise in Chicago.
Recommended Reading
The Untouchables, Eliot Ness (with Oscar Fraley), memoir, 1957.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Eric Larson, non-fiction, 2003.
Recommended Viewing
Home Alone 2, John Hughes (Writer) and Christopher Columbus (Director), comedy film, 1990.
The Untouchables, David Mamet (Screenplay, based on Eliot Ness’s 1957 memoir) and Brian De Palma (Director), feature film, 1987.
