January 22, 1953 – The president of the Federal
Reserve Bank at 230 South La Salle Street, Clifford S. Young, announces that the
summer will see the addition of four stories to the 15-story building. The bank, which holds nine billion dollars in
its own assets and 18 billion for the treasury and banks belonging to the federal
reserve system. The architects will be
Naess & Murphy, the same firm that will design the Prudential building,
still two years away, and the Sun-Times building on the river that will be
started the year that Prudential finishes.
The four floors of the bank on La Salle Street will add 88,000 square
feet of space to the building that first opened in 1923. The building will not need any additional
foundation work to support the weight of the addition, and that addition will
relate aesthetically to the classical design of the building as well as to the
Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago directly across
La Salle Street to the east.
Also on this date from an earlier blog entry . . .
January 22, 1954 -- The Chicago City Council Finance Committee votes to allocate $950,000 from motor fuel tax funds for construction of a steel viaduct extending Lake Street eastward across Michigan Avenue to Beaubien Court. At that point the viaduct would turn south to Randolph Street, passing along the west side of the Prudential building, which was under construction. A new viaduct might not sound like a big deal, but that piece of infrastructure, along with Prudential, were the first steps in converting the massive railroad yards, extending from the river south to Randolph and from Michigan Avenue to the lake, into what is today's Illinois Center. The grainy photo above, taken over ten years later, shows a portion of the viaduct, the "L" shaped roadway in the lower left corner of the photo. Randolph Street is the long horizontal roadway at the bottom of the picture with the river winding through the photo's middle. Just below the river, where the second long train shed from the left stands, is the location of today's Hyatt Regency Chicago on Wacker Drive.
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