Monadnock Building - Surrounding Area

Surrounding Area

The Monadnock belongs to the Printing House Row District, a National Historic Landmark which includes the Manhattan Building, the Old Colony Building, and the Fisher Building, some of Chicago's seminal early skyscrapers. The Manhattan Building, built by William LeBaron Jenney in 1890, was the first building in Chicago with a complete steel skeleton or "Chicago" construction, an innovation Jenney had introduced in the Home Insurance Building in 1884. The first 16-story building in America, at the time it was "regarded with awe and fear". Jenney's masterpiece, the Manhattan was considered a technical triumph in construction. The 17-story Old Colony, built by Holabird & Roche in 1894, was considered one of the structural masterpieces of its time for its revolutionary portal form of bracing. It is the only survivor of a group of Chicago school buildings with rounded corner bays. The Fisher Building, built by Burnham in 1894, was an engineering miracle—the first tall commercial building to be built almost entirely without bricks. Its steel frame and thin terracotta curtain wall allowed two-thirds of the surface to be covered with glass.

The district overlaps geographically with the Printer's Row neighborhood, originally the center of Chicago's printing and publishing industry, but now mostly converted to residential housing. The area is also home to the largest public library in the world, the Harold Washington Library, named for Chicago's first African-American mayor, and the Loop campus of Depaul University, America's largest Roman Catholic university.

Immediately to the west on Jackson Street is the Union League Club of Chicago, founded in 1879 as a civic organization for "upright, law-abiding businessmen". To the north are the three buildings comprising Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe's minimalist Federal Plaza: the 1964 Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse, the only courthouse designed by Mies; the 1973 United States Post Office Loop Station; and the 1975 Kluczynski Federal Building, Mies's last project, considered to mark the apex of his career. The triangular, 27-story Metropolitan Correctional Center, a detention center serving the Federal courts in the Dirksen Building and nearby Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building, is southwest of the Monadnock at Clark and LaSalle.

The south leg of the Chicago Transit Authority elevated rail loop runs next to the building on Van Buren Street; the CTA's Brown, Orange, Pink, and Purple Lines are served by the Library-State/Van Buren stop one block to the east. The Jackson street subway station, serving the Blue Line, is on the Dearborn Street side of the building.