Insull's Throne, Built Months Before Its Builder's Empire Collapsed

The building ahead is shaped, if you look at it from above, like a giant armchair, a forty five story tower rising from the middle of two lower wings that flare out on either side like armrests. Chicagoans noticed the shape almost immediately after it opened in November of nineteen twenty nine and started calling it Insull's Throne, a nickname aimed squarely at the man who built it.

Samuel Insull had spent decades assembling one of the largest utility empires in the country, a pyramid of holding companies controlling electric and gas service across several states, all of it resting on a tower of borrowed money. He poured a fortune into this opera house, hiring the same architecture firm that had designed the Federal Reserve building across the Loop, determined to give Chicago a grand civic stage of its own. The timing could not have been worse. Days before the opera house opened, the stock market had already crashed, and within a few years Insull's entire financial structure, built on debt stacked on debt, came apart completely, wiping out the savings of roughly six hundred thousand shareholders who had trusted his companies. Insull fled the country rather than face prosecution, hiding first in France and then in Greece, before Turkish authorities extradited him back to the United States in nineteen thirty four. At trial, a jury acquitted him and his sixteen co defendants of every charge after only two hours of deliberation. He died in Paris four years later with almost nothing left, found at a subway station carrying the equivalent of a few dollars in his pocket, a strange end for the man whose armchair shaped throne still anchors this block of the Loop.