The Chicago Board of Trade Building is a 44-story, Art Deco skyscraper located in the Chicago Loop, standing at the foot of the LaSalle Street "canyon". Built in 1930 for the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), it has served as the primary trading venue of the CBOT and later the CME Group, formed in 2007 by the merger of the CBOT and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In 2012, the CME Group sold the CBOT Building to a consortium of real estate investors, including GlenStar Properties LLC and USAA Real Estate Company.
The CBOT has been located at the site since 1885. A building designed by William W. Boyington stood at the location , being the tallest building in Chicago from its construction until its clock tower was removed in 1895. The Boyington building became unsound in the 1920s and was demolished in 1929, replaced by the current building designed by Holabird & Root. The current building was itself Chicago's tallest until 1965, when it was surpassed by the Richard J. Daley Center.
The current structure is known for its Art Deco architecture, sculptures and large-scale stone carving, as well as large commodity trading floors. An aluminum, three-story Art Deco statue of Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture (particularly grain), caps the building. The building is a popular sightseeing attraction and location for shooting movies, and its owners and management have won awards for efforts to preserve the building and for office management. The building was listed as a Chicago Landmark in 1977 and a National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic Places honoree in 1978.
Early history
Early locations On April 3, 1848, the Board of Trade opened for business at 101 South Water Street, in a room over the Gage and Haines Flour Store. When 122 members were added in 1856, it was moved to the corner of South Water and LaSalle Streets. After another temporary relocation west on South Water Street in 1860, the first permanent home was established within the Chamber of Commerce Building on the corner of LaSalle and Washington Streets in 1865. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed that building. The exchange temporarily reopened two weeks after the fire in a wooden building known as "the Wigwam" at the intersection of Washington and Market Streets, before reclaiming its home in a new building constructed at the Chamber of Commerce site one year later.
1885 building
In 1882, construction began on the CBOT's new home, which opened at the current location on May 1, 1885. The building was designed by William W. Boyington, best known today for his work on the Chicago Water Tower. It faced Jackson Street with of frontage and was built from structural steel and granite taken from the Fox Island quarry near Vinalhaven, Maine. With a rear of enameled brick, it was 10 stories tall and featured a tower tall containing a large clock and bell, topped by a copper weather vane in the shape of a ship. The interiors were finished in mahogany and frescoed. Construction cost was $1.8 million. With four elevators and a great hall measuring , decorated by a stained-glass skylight and ornate stone balusters, it was the first commercial building in Chicago to have electric lighting. It was also the first building in the city to exceed in height and at the time was the tallest building in Chicago. The building's formal dedication ceremonies, which were described by a contemporary as "brilliant and imposing", took place on April 29, 1885, and were attended by over four thousand persons including dignitaries from around the world.
The building attracted tourists, visitors, and protesters. The inaugural banquet for the building opening was marched on by a sizable column of Chicago labor activists, under the International Working People's Association banner and led by Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, and Lizzie Holmes. "The building, on which two million dollars had been lavished in the midst of an economic depression, was denounced by the anarchists as ... the crowning symbol of all that was hateful in the private property system." The procession was cheered by thousands of spectators. Their access to the Board of Trade was blocked by a phalanx of police, first at Jackson Street, then at LaSalle Street, finally coming to within a half-block of the building, "bathed in a sea of electric light only recently installed for the occasion".
Viewing galleries were opened to the public for the first time in honor of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Two years later, the clock tower was removed and the "tallest building in Chicago" record was then held by the tall Masonic Temple Building.Zaloom, p. 27 Built on caissons surrounded by muck, the trading house was rendered structurally unsound in the 1920s when construction began across the street on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The 1885 building was subsequently demolished in 1929, and the exchange temporarily moved to Van Buren and Clark while a new building was constructed at the LaSalle and Jackson site.
The 1885 allegorical architectural sculptures of Industry and Agriculture, two figures of a four-piece set, were removed from the original building and now stand in a nearby pedestrian plaza.
1930 building
Architecture In 1925, the Chicago Board of Trade commissioned Holabird & Root to design the current building. The general contractors Hegeman & Harris built it for $11.3 million, although the reported twenty-year mortgage value was $12 million.Bruegmann, p. 23Bruegmann, p. 34 Clad in gray Indiana limestone, topped with a copper pyramid roof, and standing on a site running east–west on Jackson Boulevard and north–south on LaSalle Street, the tall art deco-styled building opened on June 9, 1930. It serves as the southern border for the skyscrapers hugging LaSalle Street and is taller than surrounding structures for several blocks. The Chicago Board of Trade has operated continuously on its fourth floor since the 1930 opening, dedicating to what was then the world's largest trading floor. Built in 1930 and first designated a Chicago Landmark on May 4, 1977, the building was listed as a US National Historic Landmark on June 2, 1978. It was added to the US National Register of Historic Places on June 16, 1978.
The advent of steel frame structural systems allowed completely vertical construction; but as with many skyscrapers of the era, the exterior was designed with multiple setbacks at increasing heights, which served to allow additional light into the ever-deepening concrete "valleys" in urban cores. At night, the setbacks are upwardly lit by floodlights, further emphasizing the structure's vertical elements. The night illumination design was a common contemporary Chicago architectural theme, seen also in the Wrigley Building, the Jewelers Building, the Palmolive Building, the LaSalle-Wacker Building, and the Tribune Tower.Saliga, Pauline A. (ed.), p. 113.
Interior decoration includes polished surfaces throughout, the use of black and white marble, prominent vertical hallway trim, and an open three-story lobby which at the time of opening housed the world's largest electric light fixture. Though One LaSalle Street had five more floors, the CBOT building was the first in Chicago to exceed a height of . After surpassing the Chicago Temple Building, it was the tallest in Chicago until the Daley Center was completed in 1965. Known for its work on the Brooklyn Bridge, the family-operated factory of John A. Roebling supplied all of the cables used in the building's 23 Otis elevators. Beneath the main trading floor, over of telephone and telegraph wires were once hidden. No less than of wires (considered possibly the most direct long-distance wire from any building) once ran from the room.Bruegmann, p. 39 Although the building was commissioned for the Chicago Board of Trade, its first tenant was the Quaker Oats Company, which moved in on May 1, 1930.Bruegmann, p. 35
Artwork
Sculptural work by Alvin Meyer, the one-time head of Holabird & Root's sculpture department, is prominent on the building's façade, and represents the trading activities within. On each side of the diameter clock facing LaSalle Street are hooded figures, a Babylonian holding grain and a Native American holding corn.Zaloom, p. 28 Similar figures are repeated at the uppermost corners of the central tower, just below the sloping roof. About above street level, representations of bulls protrude directly from the limestone cladding on the building's north side and to a lesser degree on the east side, a reference to a bull market.
The central structure is capped by a 6,500 pound, tall aluminum statue by sculptor John H. Storrs of the Roman goddess of grain, Ceres, holding a sheaf of wheat in the left hand and a bag of corn in the right hand, as a nod to the exchange's heritage as a commodities market. This statue was assembled from 40 pieces.
Commissioned in 1930 but removed from the agricultural trading room in 1973 and stored until 1982, John W. Norton's three-story mural of Ceres shown bare-breasted in a field of grain underwent extensive restoration in Spring Grove, Illinois, by Louis Pomerantz before being displayed in the atrium of the 1980s addition to the back of the building.
Trading floor According to the June 16, 1930, issue of Time magazine, visitors carrying ripened wheat heads stared in curiosity at the six-story tall trading room directly above the lobby and behind the large windows below the clock facing LaSalle Street. At the center of the room, Time reported on the items being traded in "pits" organized based on commodities type with pits names such as the corn pit, soybean pit or wheat pit. The individual pits are raised octagonal structures where open outcry trading occurs. Steps up the outside of each octagon provide an amphitheater atmosphere, and enable a large number of traders to see each other and communicate during trading hours. With early versions dating back to 1870, this type of trading pit was patented in 1878.
The trading area is surrounded by desks allowing workers to support transactions. In the early days, the desks served as a relay point between the pits and those wishing to buy or sell. When trade orders and information began to be communicated by telegraph, Morse code operators were employed, later replaced by phone operators.
Subsequent additions to the Board of Trade Building moved the agricultural and financial trading floors out of the original trading room and into new spaces in the additions to the building's rear in the 1980s. In 2004, the historic 1930 trading floor, already substantially altered (and unused for more than two years), was demolished and its pits filled with concrete. It was renovated in a modern style and is now leased to a privately owned options trading firm.
Expansion In 1980, the owners added a 23-story expansion to the south side of the building.Zaloom, p. 45 It was topped by an octagonal ornament shaped similarly to the terraced trading pits and was designed in a postmodern style by architect Helmut Jahn. Colored black and silver, with a sunlit atrium on the 12th floor facing the south wall of the older structure, the annex provided a four-story granite lined agricultural trading floor, then the world's largest at . Even as the Sydney Futures Exchange and other markets were ceasing outcry trading, Mayor Richard M. Daley led the groundbreaking on January 17, 1995, for additional expansion into a five-story building to the east designed by architects Fujikawa Johnson and structural engineers TT-CBM. When opened in 1997, the $175 million structure would add of trading space and for a period again would house the world's largest trading floor. It was nicknamed the "Arboretum" by some in reference to expansion supporter CBOT Chairman Patrick H. Arbor. The expansion included price boards long and supported 12,000 computers, 6,000 voice devices, and 2,000 video devices requiring of cable.