A Wabash Avenue Mid-Winter Fire, Chicago

When this block of Jewelers Row burned on a freezing January night in 1908, thousands watched from Michigan Avenue as the biggest Loop fire since 1874 torched milliners, booksellers, furniture makers, and a wallpaper company. There wasn’t a single jeweler amongst the insurance claims, though—turns out, that name came much later and implies a level of economic homogeneity that obscures how diverse and industrious Wabash Avenue was in its heyday. The fire, which had no fatalities, threatened the Chicago Athletic Association, as well as Adler & Sullivan’s S.A. Maxwell Loft Building, but ultimately only one of the burned buildings collapsed in the fire—the building where it started, home to the Alfred Peats Wall Paper Company. The rebuilt Alfred Peats Building (1908), the Rae Building (1872), and the Griffiths Buildings survived long enough to have their facades preserved in a facadectomy for the Legacy at Millennium Park, a condo tower completed in 2009. 

So, what’s changed?

• While the facades are mostly different—they’ve been active commercial spaces for more than a century, revamped and remodeled for a wide variety of tenants who have cycled—the general scale and form of the streetwall has basically been retained, even though they’re now just a shallow retail liner for a skyscraper.
• The Madison/Wabash station was demolished in 2015, consolidated with the Randolph/Wabash station to create the Washington/Wabash station a block further down. 
• The cityscape towards the river has obviously filled in with towers, in this case the Jewelers Building and Trump Tower.
• Notice the disappearance of projecting signs? Even in the post-fire carnage of the 1908 streetscape they're everywhere, but today they're scarce because of cost, permitting, and potential liability.

Wabash was the bustling utilitarian counterpart to the upmarket department stores of State Street one street over, even before the superstructure of the Union Loop Elevated put it into the literal shade in the 1890s. At the turn of the century, this block between Monroe and Madison typified that industrious mix of shops, light manufacturing, warehouses, and lofts.

In 1908, on the eve of the fire, the Continental Hotel stood on the northernmost lot, on the corner of Wabash and Madison, then heading south you have the S.A. Maxwell Loft Building, built in 1882 and designed by Adler & Sullivan—now known as the Jewelers Building, at the time it held an H.H. Kohlsaat lunch counter and various small manufacturers. Office equipment, pianos, artificial flowers, and wall paper were sold behind the post-fire cast iron facades of the Rae Building and the Alfred Peats Building. The furthest south visible here, the Crozer Estate Building (1879), housed the John A. Colby & Sons Furniture Co., the Morris Book Shop, and a Remington Typewriter store. 

On a windy, cold Tuesday in January, 1908 a fire started in the basement of the Alfred Peats Wall Paper Company Building shortly after it closed for the night. Racing up the elevator shaft in the back of the building, the fire crossed the alleyway and set the Edson Keith Building on Michigan Avenue ablaze. Thousands—the Chicago Tribune said 50,000 and the Interocean said 15,000—congregated in Grant Park and at the Illinois Central tracks to watch as dozens of engine companies fought the blaze. The fire even threatened the Chicago Athletic Association until the winds shifted. It must have been a dry winter—this was the third serious fire in the city in three days—and this was the biggest fire downtown since the Little Chicago Fire of 1874. One difference was that the Union Loop L now ran down Wabash, and the fire department ran hoses up to the Wabash and Madison platform to fight this blaze. The front and rear facades of the Alfred Peats Building collapsed, but by 2:00am the fire was under control. 

The Alfred Peats Building and John A. Colby & Sons Furniture section of the Crozen Building ended up caked in ice, at least one cast iron facade strewn onto the sidewalk. Initial losses were estimated at more than $1.7m (equivalent to $60m in 2026). Remarkably, only the Peats building was damaged beyond repair. Insurers declared the Crozen Estate Building, home to the Colby furniture store., the Morris Book Shop, and Remington Typewriters, a total loss, but as far as I can tell the owner just renovated the burned and flooded building and reopened. The Peats Building was demolished and rebuilt that same year, designed by the Doerr Bros. (the NRHP nomination and the Chicago Landmark Designation say this building was from 1872, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong and they tore down that building after the fire).

Over the next century literally hundreds of businesses would pass through these buildings. Restaurants, stores, manufacturers, offices, even an illegal bookie. Among others:

• Renamed the Jewelers Building, Adler & Sullivan’s S.A. Maxwell Loft Building housed the Millionaires’ Club and, much later, a Popeye’s. This one is also has an individual City of Chicago landmark designation.
• 21-23 S. Wabash, built in 1872 and designed by Frederick Baumann, once held Harding’s Colonial Room and, later, a Wendy’s .
• The rebuilt Alfred Peat’s Building, 25-27 S. Wabash, housed Donchian Furniture, Grant’s Art Galleries, Utility Stationary Store, and a Walgreens (this was also the one that had an illegal book in the 1930s and 1940s)
• Bought in 1915, renamed the Griffiths Building, and remodeled by Holabird & Roche, 29-35 S. Wabash was home to legendary Chicago bookstore Kroch’s & Brentano’s from the 1950s into the 1990s (from 1938 into the 1950s, it was just Brentano’s here). Upstairs, at one point there was a hat factory.

Most of this block was included in the Loop Retail Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. A few years later, in 2003, it was designated a City of Chicago Landmark District, with all of these buildings considered contributing buildings except (weirdly, since it was the oldest) the 1872 Rae Building. 

That landmark designation came into play very quickly here. In 2005, Mesa Development and SCB proposed repeating the trick they performed one block north on Wabash at The Heritage at Millennium Park, where they demolished everything but the facade of four post-fire commercial buildings and used them to line the skyscraper’s parking garage. The Legacy at Millennium Park would be taller, sleeker, and even more ambitious than the Heritage—72 stories, 360 condos, and a disgusting 460 parking spaces right next to the L. 

Learning from their experience up the street, in this case the developers intended to turn most of the street level into active commercial space (initial coverage even suggested that they would preserve the first 30 feet of these buildings, but that sounds complicated and expensive enough that I doubt it was a real proposal). There was a preservation fight that centered mostly on process—how, only a few years after designating these buildings as a landmark district, could the city turn around and demolish everything but a few feet of facade? But this was a lucrative project during a real estate boom, with a successful track record to point at. Besides the ridiculous parking ratio, the Legacy was a cool project too. It moved through approvals quickly, and by 2006 these were just facades on steel frames, with progress claiming what the 1908 fire did not. 

Further reading:

• Jewelers Row District Landmark Designation Report
• Loop Retail Historic District NRHP Nomination Form
• 2004 PD Submission, the Legacy at Millennium Park

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