Printers Row, Where the Midwest's Books Got Made

The handsome loft buildings lining this block were never meant to be apartments. Between eighteen eighty six and nineteen twenty two, more than forty buildings went up here in the shadow of Dearborn Station specifically for the printing trade, and companies like Rand McNally and other major publishing houses ran their presses behind these same facades, turning this handful of blocks into the publishing capital of the entire Midwest. The arrangement was almost absurdly efficient: raw paper and ink came in by rail straight through the station at one end of the block, and finished books, newspapers, and magazines went back out through the same station at the other end, without much distance in between.

The trade did not last forever. Printing companies started moving to the suburbs through the nineteen sixties and seventies, chasing cheaper space and modern equipment, and Dearborn Station itself closed to passengers not long after, leaving the neighborhood mostly empty. What saved the buildings was the very thing that had made them useful for printing in the first place: those tall, open, heavily reinforced floors built to carry the weight of industrial presses turned out to make unusually good apartments. Starting in the early nineteen eighties, developers began converting the old printing houses into residential lofts, and by nineteen ninety six the district had its own landmark protection, preserving a skyline that still reads, if you know what to look for, like a map of the old publishing trade. Look up at the stonework on these facades as you pass and you can still make out the carved names of printing firms that have not shipped a single book out of this neighborhood in generations.