The Board of Trade, Protested by the Man It Would Later Hang

The tower ahead, crowned by a thirty one foot aluminum statue of the Roman goddess of grain, is not the first Board of Trade building to stand on this spot, and the first one did not die quietly. When that original building opened in May of eighteen eighty five, it rose three hundred and twenty feet into a tower with its own four thousand five hundred pound bell, tall enough to make it the tallest building in Chicago. At its opening banquet, a line of protesters marched outside under the banner of the International Working People's Association, led by Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, and Lizzie Holmes, denouncing the new building as, in their words, the crowning symbol of everything hateful in the private property system. Police blocked them from the building itself, but thousands of onlookers watched the march pass beneath what newspapers called a sea of electric light.

The following year, in May of eighteen eighty six, a bomb thrown at a labor rally near Haymarket Square killed police officers and bystanders. Albert Parsons was arrested and hanged in November of eighteen eighty seven, one of four men executed for a bombing that happened blocks from where he had marched against this very building. The Board of Trade itself stood for several more decades before engineers judged it structurally unsound in the nineteen twenties, and it came down in nineteen twenty nine. The Art Deco tower that replaced it, designed by Holabird and Root and opened in nineteen thirty, became Chicago's tallest building and stayed that way for thirty five years. It still houses commodities trading today, a business the Parsons once called hateful, operating now under a statue of Ceres instead of a clock.