The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Built Because the Loop Ran Out of Room

By nineteen nineteen, the young Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, barely five years old, had outgrown every rented office it could find in the Loop. Its staff had swollen to twelve hundred people scattered across a patchwork of borrowed buildings, examiners and clerks working out of whatever space downtown landlords could spare. The solution was this building on your left, a seventeen story Beaux Arts headquarters on LaSalle Street that opened in nineteen twenty two, built to hold the entire operation under one roof for the first time.

The firm behind it, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, was one of the busiest in Chicago at the time, and its fingerprints are all over this stretch of LaSalle Street. The same architects had designed the Continental Illinois Bank building, originally the Illinois Merchants Bank, directly across the street just a couple of years earlier, giving two competing pillars of Chicago finance, a commercial bank and the region's central bank, matching limestone facades facing each other across the same block. The Federal Reserve building's scale reflected its new importance. After the panic of nineteen oh seven exposed how fragile the nation's banking system really was, Congress created the Federal Reserve System in nineteen thirteen specifically to prevent the kind of bank runs that had forced private financiers to bail out the country themselves. Chicago's branch became one of the system's largest, overseeing banks across several Midwestern states, and this building, quietly imposing rather than flashy, was built to look like exactly what it was: the backstop behind the backstop.