American Furniture Mart

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American Furniture Mart, 666 Lake Shore Place
Life Span: 1923/1926-Present
Location: 666 Lake Shore Drive
Architect: Henry Raeder (East portion), George C. Nimmons and N. Max Dunning (West portion)

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National Hotel Reporter, June 27, 1923

AMERICAN EXPOSITION PALACE.
Will Occupy The Two First Floors Of The Largest Building In The Wold Now Being Erected In Chicago.
Chicago is to have a new and modern exhibition building for the display of trade shows and farm products, it is announced. The building, which is expected, to be the finest in America, will be known as the American Exposition Palace, located at 666 Lake Shore drive.

It will occupy the first two floors of the worlds largest building, the American Furniture Mart Building, which is now being erected at a cost $10,000,000.

The lobby alone of the Exposition Palace will cost $100,000 and will be decorated after tbe style of the best hotel lobbies. The lobby will lead by thiee main doorways into the main exposition hall.

The first show will be held in the Palace in May, 1924, Spearman Lewis, managing director of the organization, announced. Pending the completion of the building the exposition palace headquarters are maintained in the Wrigley building.

With Chicago rapidly becoming the worlds largest furniture market plans for tbe organization of a new furniture Club of America with headquarters here are announced by the National Wholesale Furniture Association which opened its annual meeting at the Congress Hotel on Tuesday last.

The new club is to have a membership of 50 manufacturers, 2,500 retailers and 1,000 salesmen, and is to have its clubrooms on the top floor of the American Furniture mart, the big new exhibition building of the industry, now under construction on the lake shore as above mentioned. The American Furniture mart will as already stated, be the largest building in the world. It will have 500,000 feet of floor space, of which 1,250,000 feet will be given over to exhibition purposes.

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American Furniture Mart
680 N. Lake Shore Dr. (formerly 666 N. Lake Shore Dr.)
1924

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Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1925

George C. Nimmons Co. and N. Max Dunning were associate architects of the above 472 foot tower annex to the big American Furniture Mart, which when completed will cover the entire block bounded by Lake Shore drive, Erie, Huron, and McClurg court. The tower will face west on McClurg and will add about nine acres of floor space to the original mart, giving it a total area of 434 acres and ‘making it the largest building in the world, according to the owners. The part now built is sixteen stories.

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Chicago’s Accomplishments and Leaders, Glenn A. Bishop and Paul T. Gilbert, 1932

THE AMERICAN FURNITURE MART, WORLD HEADQUARTERS FOR HOME FURNISHINGS
Style Shows Which Attract Thousands of Buyers
By V. L. Alward,
President, American Furniture Mart Building Corporation

Imagine a bazaar street twenty blocks long, lined on each side with furniture stores, each 100 feet in depth. Picture in these shops hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of home furnishings—period furniture, reproductions of Sheraton, Chippendale, and Hepplewhite; gay sun room and garden furniture; modernistic furniture in chaste geometric designs; dignified swivel chairs and glass’topped desks and directors’ tables; “Mother Goose” furniture for the nursery. Imagine these displays behind plate glass windows fronting on five miles of corridors, and you will have a conception of the interior of the American Furniture Mart at 666 Lake Shore Drive.

The exterior of this beautiful building, the largest in the world devoted to a single industry, and the world’s third largest commercial building, its seventeen stories surmounted by a 474-foot tower, is familiar to all. The interior, however, is seldom viewed by the public. Admission is by pass, and, as a rule, only members of the trade are admitted.

The Mart was built in 1924, and the tower was added three years later. In ground area 500 by 200 feet in dimensions, it occupies an entire city block in the heart of the Gold Coast, overlooking Lake Michigan. It represents an investment of more than $15,000,000, and its 2,000,000 square feet of floor space are given over to displays of furniture from the leading manufacturing houses of the United States.

Chicago is the central market place for the output of furniture makers in such strongholds of the industry as Grand Rapids, Rockford, Sheboygan, and Evansville. Furnishings shown in the Mart are made in factories of 235 cities distributed among thirty states, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York. If all this merchandise were not concentrated in Chicago, it would take a furniture buyer eight months to visit the factories represented, allowing him only one day in each city. There are approximately 700 exhibitors. The furniture exhibited at the Mart represents seventy-five percent of all such merchandise sold at wholesale in the United States.

The Mart is open every business day of the year, but attendance reaches a peak twice yearly, in July and January, when the semi-annual furniture style shows are held. To these great fairs, which last two weeks, come buyers—more than 6,000 of them, from every important city in the country, and from Canada and Europe, to study the new designs, compare styles and values, and to lay in stocks. During the year approximately 25,000 buyers visit the Mart.

Within the Mart are samples of practically every type of period furnishings: Georgian, Early American, Early English, French Empire and French Provincial; Federal American, Contemporary, Biedermeier, Queen Anne, Directoire, each telling its story of human vanities and fluctuations of tastes and manners as dictated by monarchs, foreign trade, and other influences.

The most popular period style, authorities at the Furniture Mart agree, is Georgian. Reproductions of the masterpieces of the eighteenth century designers seem to have found general acceptance in the American home. Contemporary furniture, although greatly subdued as compared with the “modernistic” which began to attain prominence in 1928 and 1929, is still too individual to appeal to the volume market, its sale being restricted mostly to the metropolitan centers such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

The exhibits are as complete in regard to types of furnishings as they are to styles. There are beds, chairs, tables, buffets, china cabinets, dressers, vanities, chiffoniers, radios, lamps, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, springs, mattresses, pillows, baby carriages, bedding chests, nursery furniture, pictures, clocks, china and pottery, davenports, garden and beach umbrellas, fireplace equipment, desks, rugs and linoleums, metal furniture, sun room furniture, wrought iron products, and toys in endless variety.

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American Furniture Mart
Main Entrance
About 1928

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On the seventeenth floor are the elaborately appointed club rooms of the Furniture Club of America, the walls of which are decorated with rich tapestries and costly paintings. The club provides for visiting merchants, manufacturers, and buyers a common meeting ground and a Chicago home complete in every respect except for sleeping quarters. The walnut-paneled Club restaurant is patronized by 250,000 furniture men during the year.

The Mart also is the headquarters of the National Retail Furniture Association and the National Association of Furniture Manufacturers, and is the home of Radio Station WCFL, Chicago.

With sales averaging more than $100,000,000 a year—and these sales do not include those of the department stores—the retail furniture business ranks fifth among Chicago’s retail trades. There are about 1,200 retail furniture establishments with combined inventories of $20,000,000.

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American Furniture Mart
Ross & Browne Real Estate Map