Three Lives of One Lot

Where the headquarters for one of the world's biggest fast food companies now stands, this plot of ground once served a much darker purpose, as an emergency morgue after one of the deadliest disasters in Chicago history.

In nineteen fifteen, the steamship Eastland rolled over in the Chicago River, killing more than eight hundred passengers, most of them employees on a company outing. In the chaos afterward, the National Guard armory that stood on this site was converted into a makeshift morgue, where rows of victims were laid out for identification.

Decades later, in the late nineteen eighties, that same ground became something entirely different, Harpo Studios, the production home Oprah Winfrey built for her television show, which began broadcasting from here in January of nineteen ninety. For more than two decades, this unassuming studio complex grew into one of the most influential addresses in American media, as Winfrey's show became a daily ritual for millions of viewers and launched a media empire that stretched far beyond Chicago.

The studio was sold in twenty fourteen, and the building itself was torn down two years later. In its place rose the new global headquarters for McDonald's, which opened on the site in twenty eighteen, bringing the company's corporate offices into the city it has called home for most of its history.

So this single block has quietly cycled through three unrelated identities, a militia armory turned disaster morgue, a television empire's production studio, and now the nerve center of a global restaurant chain. Few stretches of pavement anywhere carry that much unrelated history stacked directly on top of each other.