History
The two earliest buildings, the old Administration Building and the Mail Order House, are constructed of reinforced concrete and were designed by Richard E. Schmidt and Hugh Garden, members of the architectural firm of Schimdt, Garden, and Martin.
The 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m2), eight-story Administration Building served as the company's headquarters until 1974, and features sword and torch motifs on the base and vertical piers that rise uninterrupted until culminiating in a parapet with motifs similar to the base. A four-story tower was added in 1929 on the northeast corner of the building, with a pyramid roof crowned with a 22.5-foot (6.9 m) bronze statue that originally topped the former Montgomery Ward Building on Michigan Avenue. An adaption of an earlier sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that had topped both Madison Square Garden in New York and the Agriculture Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the statue is called The Spirit of Progress, and depicts the goddess Diana, dressed in flowing robes, balancing on a globe, and holding a torch in her right hand and a caduceus in her left hand.
Forty feet north of the Administration Building is the 2,000,000-square-foot (190,000 m2) Mail Order House, also known as the Catalog House, that was the heart of Montgomery Ward's operations. Completed in 1908, the eight-story building was painted white and capped with a flat roof, with an interior that contained miles of chutes, conveyors, and storage lofts within ceiling heights ranging from 12 to 17 feet (5.2 m). The west facade, following a bend in the river, is almost 1,100 feet (340 m) long and a single floor covers 6 acres (24,000 m2). At one time the building had its own post office branch as well as a ground-floor shipping platform that could accommodate 24 railroad freight cars. The Catalog House was designated a Chicago Landmark on May 17, 2000.
In later years, Montgomery Ward and Company added several warehouses and parking ramps, followed by a 26-story office building in 1972, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the former World Trade Center towers in New York City.
Read more about this topic: Montgomery Ward Company Complex
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—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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—Stefan Zweig (18811942)