The Rookery Building, A Marble Lie Over a Dead Man's Iron

On your right, behind a facade of red brick and terra cotta, sits a building whose own name started as a joke at the city's expense. Before the Rookery rose here, this corner held a makeshift city hall thrown up after the Great Fire of eighteen seventy one, a wooden barracks so overrun with crows and pigeons, and so widely seen as a nest for corrupt aldermen, that Chicagoans started calling it the rookery, an old word for a crowded, disreputable roost. When Daniel Burnham and John Root finished the real building in eighteen eighty eight, twelve stories of iron and masonry wrapped around a glass covered light court, they kept the mocking nickname as its name.

Root filled that central court with an ornate wrought iron staircase and a skylight set with five thousand panes of glass, the ironwork curling into the kind of lace like patterns his generation of architects prized. He did not live to see what came next. In nineteen oh five, nearly two decades after the Rookery opened, the building's owners brought in a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright to remodel the lobby, and Wright did something almost contrarian: he covered Root's intricate ironwork in smooth white Carrara marble, cut with geometric, Persian inspired patterns and traced in gold leaf. It is the only building inside the Loop where Wright's own hand ever touched the interior, a modernist's marble skin laid directly over his predecessor's ironwork, inside a building still named for the corrupt politicians who worked on this corner first.