Rand Mc Nally Building IV, Federal Building
Life Span: 1912-Present
Location: 536-538 S. Clark, NW corner Harrison and Clark
Architect: Holabird & Roche
Chicago Tribune, January 30, 1910
Real Estate Market.
But the most important deal of the week, probably, was the definite announcement made early in the week that Rand. McNally & Co. had acquired the Haven property at 326-328 Clark street, 250 feet north of Harrison street, east front, thus clearing the way for the construction of the much talked of big plant of the company at the northwest corner of Clark and Harrison streets.
It is said that the alley vacation difficulty with the city has not been fully adjusted yet, but it also is understood that it is under consideration, and will, in all probability, be settled in a short time.
Inter Ocean, July 11, 1911
The last formality preliminary to the erection of the Rand-McNally building at Clark and Harrison streets has been concluded, and the work of construction will begin immediately. A new lease on the property owned by the board of education has been entered into, to conform to the rental periods on the other lots, whereby the publishing house acquires 50×105 feet of ground fronting east on Clark street, 198 fe north of Harrison, for a term of eighty-eight years and nine months at a gross rental of $736,176.
Capitalized on a 4 per cent basis the average annual rental of $8,273 would fix a value of $206,825 for the lot, which is equivalent to $4,136.50 a front foot and $39.40 a square foot.
This completes tbe acquisition of a site fronting 300 feet on Clark, 300 feet on LaSalle and 220 feet on Harrison street, on which the Rand-McNally company proposes to erect a mammoth printing establishment to be ready for occupancy May 1. 1912. The building will be of fireproof construction, ten stories and basement high and will cost not less than $1,500,000. Each atory will contain 66,000 square feet of Boor space.
Architectural Record, April, 1912
Chicago Central Business and Office Directory, 1922
Rand McNally Building
This building is ten stories and basement in height, of the most modern fireproof construction, and has a frontage of 300 feet each on Clark and La Salle streets and 216 feet on Harrison street.
The exterior of the building is of granite, terra cotta and brick, and there is a spacious entrance on Clark street and an entrance on La Salle street.
The equipment of the building includes nine large electric passenger and freight elevators, standard automatic sprinkler system throughout, steam heat, hot and cold water, and electric lights.
A most important feature is an immense light court in the center of the building, sixty-eight by one hundred and twenty-eight feet in dimensions, as wide as a street and one-third of a block long.
To tenants contemplating a change of location, we believe this building offers unusual advantages in convenience and prominence, exceptionally low insurance rate, and completeness of equipment. The rentals are 65 to 85 cents per square foot.
Polk’s Chicago Numerical Street and Avenue Directory, 1928
Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1952
When Andrew McNally III, president of Rand McNally & Co., invited us to a press conference recently it was not to announce the publication of another book—such as their fabulous best seller, Kon-Tiki, or their, Give the Lady What She Wants! which crowded even Kon-Tiki, for best seller list honors. It was to announce a competition for a mural which will decorate the reception lobby in the new general office and factory in Skokie, Ill., which this country’s most famous publisher of maps will occupy in October. The competition is limited, in the sense that only 10 famous artists were invited to compete. Five have already accepted.
Judges of Contests Are Named
Rainey Bennett, who did the Magazine of Books Cover for April 20, and Edgar Miller of Chicago, were present at the press conference to give it an added air of party gayety; the others were Fred Conway of Ladue, O., Edward Melcarth of New York City, and Siegfried Reinhardt of St. Louis, all famous mural painters.
Judges of the contest will be Frederick A. Sweet, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago; Edwin Snyder, art director of Rand McNally, and Rolfe Renouf of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the architects of the new building. It was Mr. Renouf, so Mr. McNally told us, who suggested that for a building devoted to the arts of literature, creative printing, and cartography (and map making is one of the fine arts), it would be most appropriate to have a really fine mural to greet visitors. Well, we’ll know by October whose name will’ be signed to the mural which will do that.
This will be the first time in 96 years that Rand McNally will not be rooted in the Loop. They have been in their own block-square building at 536 S. Clark st. since 1912. At the party there were framed photographs of their previous homes. The one of the building at 51 N. Clark st. would especially interest Tribune readers. The sign over the first floor read Rand McNally & Co., over the second and third, The Chicago Daily Tribune. That was a historic building from many points of view, for not only did Rand McNally and the job printing section of the Tribune share the building, but it, like much of Chicago, became ashes in the great fire of 1871. Three days later the two energetic founders of Rand McNaly were in business again. And, in case you don’t remember, there was only ONE day when Chicagoans did not have their favorite morning, newspaper. One of the most dramatic stories about the fire was written by Joseph Medill, then editor of The Tribune, and it is still one of the most frequently consulted records of a day and a night which left a young city in physical ashes but aflame to become great.
World’s “First Ail-Steel Structure”
The picture of the building at 154-174 W. Adams st., which was the home of Rand McNally from 1890 to 1912, bore the legend, Rand McNally erects its own building, the first all steel structure in the world.” Marvin G. Probst of the firm of architects who designed the new building and who was at the party, cast a quizzical eye at that assertion when I asked him about it. The question of which was the first all steel building in the world is still fightin’ words, according to him.
Guests at the party went home happily laden with the newest edition of the famous Rand McNally road atlas, whose cover was recently redesigned. If the road atlas is as perfect a 36 as possible, Rand McNally does publish a map which is certainly a stylish stout. It is a “master map” of the United States which is 16 feet long and 10 feet high. It is used by many business firms, carries data of commercial value and leaves room for notations to be made upon it.
That bit of information I got, not from “Mr. McNally (who is a storehouse of family business information) but from an article in the Saturday Review by Harland Manchester, who undoubtedly got his information from young Andrew McNally. Only 40, he is still, “young Andy” to many members of the firm because his father, the second Andrew McNally to bear that name, is still active in the firm as chairman of the board.
From Railroad Tickets to Road Maps
A reprint of that interesting Saturday Review article published Jan. 21, 1950 was another part of the take home pay of the party for in it we found many fascinating bits of information. There was, for instance, the fact that Mr. Rand and Mr. McNally together evolved the idea of making railway maps. It was the logical result of their first big printing jobs time tables and tickets for railroads the firm still has a flourishing business in all sorts of tickets. They decided that if a man was going somewhere on a train he’d like to know where he was going, as well as how. Rand McNally, I read, started the trail marking of motor routes with placards on telephone poles before there was a United States highway system with a slogan, “Follow the Blazed Trail.” To this day the road map drafting room is still called the blazed trail department. Today in that one department alone Rand McNally turns out more than 50 million maps a year!
One of the first trail blazers was the now staid Andrew McNally, chairman of the board. In June, 1908, he handed his beautiful bride, Betty Vilas, into his motor car a sensation in itself and they set out on a hazardous trip to chart a road between Chicago and Milwaukee. Armed with a huge box camera they returned with their quarry Photographs of strategic spots en route from which a photo-auto guide-was made. Those photo-auto guides would completely baffle a motorist nowadays for they were sometimes 200 pages thick and their directions were photographs of intersections. Some of them thoughtfully showed two ways to get to the same destination, one to be used in wet weather, the other in dry, for there were no paved roads.
- Rand McNally Building
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map
1927
- Rand McNally Building
Ross & Browne Real Estate Map
1928
Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1997
By Tim JonesTribune Staff Writer
A remarkable era of family control of the world’s biggest mapmaker Rand McNally & Co. will officially come to a close this fall, after Tuesday’s announcement that the Skokie-based company will be sold to a New York investment group. For 141 years, a Rand or mostly a McNally has led the company, founded in 1856 as a book and ticket printer. The privately held firm expanded into mapmaking in 1872 and has earned the reputation through road maps, globes and atlases as being the world’s premier cartographic source. Although Rand McNally was put out of business for three days after the Chicago Fire in 1871, it went on to produce the first globes and maps for schools, in 1880; the first road map using numbered highways, in 1917, and the first Rand McNally Road Atlas, in 1924.
But few companies, including icons from the rich trove of Chicago’s publishing history, can survive the ravages of competition and technology without selling, crashing or going public. Tuesday was Rand McNally’s turn to announce a changing of the guard. “The company was sold for very, very specific reasons,” said McNally publishing prest dent Henry Feinberg, who will be the first non-family member to serve as chief executive when the sale is finalized in the fall Specifically, the buyer has deeper pockets than the McNally’s. Current shareholders, most of whom are members of the McNally family, will retain a minority interest in the firm. The company said it will retain its historic presence in the Chicago area with a full complement of 1,000 employees.
The agreement to sell majority control of the firm to AEA Investors Inc. the terms were not disclosed reflects not only the changing face of a Chicago-area institution, but fundamental shifts in the business of mapmaking as welL
In the competitive world of maps, it is no longer enough to simply show people where something is.
Andrew McNally IV, the outgoing chairman and chief executive officer, declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed. He said in a statement that the agreement “will assure that Rand McNally has the financial resources to further extend the company’s leadership and realize its full potential for future growth.”
That could easily mean surviving in an increasingly tough competitive environment
AEA Investors, founded in 1969 by such industrial families as the Rockefellers, Mellons and Harrimans, makes controlling investments on behalf of its investors in market-leading companies. AEA will leave the strategic decisions to Rand McNally.
Just as the CD-ROM revolutionized the encyclopedia business, forcing the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica to sell out last year, software competition has changed the nature of mapmaking.
“The mapping industry has been completely changed by the Internet and technology. It’s not even clear what a map is anymore,” said Mohanbir Sawhney, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management
“In the good old analog days, you picked a map up and stuck it on the wall Now cartography is a commodity. Everybody is using the same maps, and they’re competing with software, not on just showing you something, but telling you how to get there, and even what to do when you get there,” Sawhney said.
Satellite-delivered maps, with instructions on how to get to destinations, soon will revolutionize automobile travel, rendering traditional road maps obsolete, Sawhney said.
“If you look at this in perspective, it is really not surprising that they sold.”
The competitive arena was redefined in the early 1990s, when Census Bureau data was used to assign longitude and latitude designations to individual addresses. When combined with a technology known as computer assisted design, or CAD, software was developed that struck a body blow to the traditional maps.
Rand McNally, like Britannica with the hard-bound encyclopedia, remained wedded to the traditional maps. Eventually, the company embraced the technology.
In the months preceding its April announcement that it was considering putting itself on the sale block, Rand McNally began shedding subsidiaries after a string of unimpressive earnings.
The firm still was making money, said one analyst familiar with the company, but it was not the pre-eminent force in mapmaking that it once was. So Rand McNally took a new direction, selling its book services, ticket and label printing operations and software manufacturing and distribution subsidiaries.
“The company has really moved from being a traditional North American publisher to a global information company over the past five years,” said Feinberg, who was recruited to join Rand McNally from United Airlines in 1989.
“Five years ago, less than 5 percent of our revenue came from electronic sources. Now it’s 25 percent. By 2000, we hope it will be in excess of 50 percent.”
Feinberg said Rand McNally “will be far more global in the future. It will be electronically focused, both in software, wireless technology and the Internet”
“We have a brand that consumers tend to grow up with…it’s sort of a cradle-to-maturity type of relationship with consumers. People know what it means,” Feinberg said.
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