In Popular Culture
- Owing to the expanding postwar economy and family, ownership began offering tours in 1948. Architecture and design interest groups continue to offer scheduled tours.
- Movies and TV shows are frequently filmed on the Wells Street Bridge and underneath the elevated tracks on Franklin.
- Chicago Marathon routes have taken runners past the structure, typically on Wells Street.
- The Mart hosts the annual Art Chicago activities.
- In the opening credits of the 1970s television sitcom Good Times, the building is depicted prior to renovation and revitalization.
- The 1948 film Call Northside 777, was made in Illinois and the Mart is seen from newspaper offices on Wacker Drive.
- The lobby appeared in the movie The Hudsucker Proxy as the interior of the Hudsucker Company headquarters.
- In 1956, the eight-minute short subject film The Merchandise Mart used the Mart's name and covered in detail the building's interior and operations.
- David Letterman once called the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame "the Pez Hall of Fame" because the combination of busts atop the tall vertical pedestals resembled the candy's dispensers.
- In the 1993 film The Fugitive, the location of Harrison Ford's character is pinpointed by police when they hear a CTA train operator announce, "Next stop, Merchandise Mart" in the background of a recorded phone call.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
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“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers—and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.”
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