Armour Building I
Location: NE corner of Randolph and Michigan Ave, 102 Michigan ave.
Life Span: 1867-1871
Architect: Edw. Burling & Co.
Chicago Evening Post, October 12, 1867
Mercantile Building.
Armour’s building at the corner of Michigan avenue and Randolph street now completed, is without dispute the most elegant and substantial of our many fine business blocks. The building comprises two stores, each 45 feet front on Michigan avenue, running back to Central avenue and having a depth of 130 ft on Randolph street, each store having 6 floors, including basement, which is uncommonly high as well as well lighted as any part of the building.
The fronts on Michigan avenue and Randolph street are of the purest Athens stone, and are four stories high with a mansard roof very neatly covered with slate and having windows of an excellent design and proportion. The corners of building and the center of Randolph street front are carried up with stone several feet higher than the roof, and are well firnished with handsome cornices, parapets and stone chimney-tops, presenting a pleasing outline, and conveying an idea of property and permanence. The front of basement on Central avenue is so arranged that all goods will be received and delivered there. Each store is finished in the best manner and style for wholesale purposes, and are fitted with a steam hoisting apparatus, which connects with all the stories, and is operated by an engine located below the sidewalk on Randolph street.
Each store is heated with steam supplied from the same boiler which supplies the engine for hoisting. The building is erected from the designs furnished and under the supervision of Edw. Burling & Co., architects. The cost of this structure in $130,000.
Armour Building (Pullman Car Company Building)
1871
Northeast Corner Michigan and Randolph streets
1871
Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1869
Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1869
Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1900
LA GRANGE.
La Grange was named by Franklin D. Cossitt, who really founded the town, and epitomizes to those who know its history the stories of a wholesale failure and a correspondingly great success. Until 1870 it was known as “West Lyons,” the old station of that name standing near the site of the present Stone avenue station. The first settler remembered in local history was Mr. Leitch, who came from New Jersey to Chicago in an early day and started cattle raising. The site of La Grange was his “range,” though there is no suggestion of that word in the town’s name.
Leitch in the ’60s thought of starting a town, and went so far as to select a name, “Kensington Heights,” but business reverses overtook him and the suburban plan was abandoned.
Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1948
Pullman’s Palace Car Company, incorporated in 1867, opened for business prior it its corporation in the famous old Tremont hotel building at the southeast corner of Dearborn and Lake sts. Later it moved to a five story building at the northeast corner of Michigan av. and Randolph st. which was destroyed by the fire of 1871.
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