Chicago Board of Trade Building - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Literature
The 1885 building and trading pits were prominently featured in The Pit, the second novel by Frank Norris in The Epic of the Wheat trilogy. Life on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is detailed in the nonfiction 2004 book Leg the Spread by Cari Lynn.

Film and television
Trading operations have been used as scenes in movies such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the streetscape in the LaSalle Street canyon is used in the movies The Untouchables and Road to Perdition. In the 2005 film Batman Begins the building serves as the headquarters of the fictional Wayne Enterprises, but in the 2008 sequel, The Dark Knight, Wayne Enterprises was represented by the Richard J. Daley Center. The building itself appears in The Dark Knight.

While maintaining studios in the building for many years, WCIU-TV broadcast the Stock Market Observer, a daily seven-hour live business television news program that is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the show telecast the most hours. Additionally, the station broadcasts First Business with news of the Chicago Board of Trade. Former WVON-AM radio personality Don Cornelius began the popular dance show Soul Train in a cramped studio on the 43rd floor in 1970. When Cornelius moved the show to Los Angeles a year later, his assistant, Clinton Ghent took over the local show until it ended in 1976. Prior to Soul Train, shows filmed in the building were Kiddie A Go-Go, a dance show aimed at the pre-teen market which premiered in 1965 and Red Hot and Blues, a teen dance show hosted by local DJ Big Bill Hill which premiered in 1967.

Graphic arts
Although depicted with the tower in a Rand McNally map from 1893, later lithographs of the first 141 Jackson Street location display a red-roofed building without a tower. Memorabilia of the current building is abundant, with postcards of panoramic scenes from LaSalle Street, the clock, and lighted upper decks having been produced for decades. In views from the Museum Campus, the building's crown is framed by the middle floors of the taller Sears Tower in the background. Photographer Andreas Gursky has used the location for still life prints such as 1997's Chicago Board of Trade, I and 1999's Chicago Board of Trade, II. A photograph of the exterior, from the Museum series by Thomas Struth, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. An often-reproduced painting by Leslie Ragan for the New York Central Railroad depicts streamliner locomotives idling at LaSalle Street Station with the Board of Trade Building looming prominently in the background.

At 1211 North LaSalle Street on the city's Near North Side, a 16-story apartment hotel built in 1929 and converted into an apartment building in 1981 was used by muralist Richard Haas for trompe-l'œil murals in homage to Chicago School architecture. One of the building's sides features the Chicago Board of Trade Building, intended as a reflection of the actual building two miles (3 km) south.