875 North Michigan Avenue

Facts

Notes

• This was formerly the location of a surface parking lot.
• At the time of its completion, this was the tallest building in Chicago, surpassing the Daley Center.
• There is a public observation deck on the 94th floor. It is 1,000 feet above North Michigan Avenue.
• The restaurant on the 95th floor of this building was originally called The 95th.
• 47 floors of the Hancock Center are residential. It is like a city unto itself, and residents do not have to leave the building. The people who live there have their own post office, supermarket, restaurants (with preferred seating for residents), shops, a full-sized swimming pool, library, gym, and other amenities.
• Because the building is tapered, homes on different levels have different amounts of space even if they have the same floor plan.
• The most coveted views are to the north, overlooking Lincoln Park. The north side of the building also receives less noise from the city.
• The second-most popular view is to the west over the suburbs and spectacular sunsets, followed by the south view of the city.
• East views are least popular, especially on higher floors, because the blue lake melds with the blue sky and there's not much to see other than blue.
• Some southern views are problematic because they overlook the roof of the skyscraper next door. Residents complain that it's like having a parking lot outside their windows.
• At the time it was completed, this building had 720 apartments. That number has been reduced as various units were combined to make larger homes.
• This building and others surrounding it were erected at the location of the first City of Chicago cemetery. While all of the graves were supposed to have been moved to the cemetery in what is now Lincoln Park (and then moved again when that cemetery closed), construction in the area still turns up the occasional body.
• Before the 2009 switchover to digital television, this building's two masts carried the primary transmitting antennae for 10 television stations and five backup TV transmitters.
• The eastern mast is the taller of the two. It is 1,506 feet and three inches from the ground to the tip.
• For decades the restaurant at the top of the building would keep its wine in a literal wine cellar. Even though the restaurant is on the 94th floor, wine was kept in the basement and brought up as needed. All of the wine was moved upstairs around 2000.
• When this building opened, its elevators were billed as the fastest in America, climbing 95 stories in 40 seconds.
• Famed architect Mies van der Rohe once designed a skyscraper for this plot, but it was never built.
• The women's bathrooms at the 96th floor bar are routinely named the best in the city, in no small part because of the view.
• Talk show host Jerry Springer lived on the 91st floor of this building when his show was filmed in Chicago.
• Comedian Chris Farley died in his apartment (#6002) on the 60th floor of this building on December 18, 1997.
• The restaurant on the 95th floor of this building is where President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle had their first date.
• A 20-foot-tall star used to be suspended between the building's antennae during the Christmas season.
• The exterior of the building's 98th floor is lined with 500 eight-foot-tall lights. Colored tubes are put over them by hand to change the colors.
• When this project was proposed, there was fierce opposition because it would increase traffic in the area.
• Architecture critics panned this building's design as reminiscent of an oil derrick.
• The building's signature cross braces are each 18 stories tall.
• On a clear day it is possible to see Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
• The plaza in front of this building once had a public ice skating rink.
• Though not visible from the outside, many of the residences in this building have screened-in balconies, known as “sky terraces.”
• The residential portion of the building is its own election district. People who live here can vote without going below the 44th floor.
• There is a time capsule at the top of the building. Among the items inside is a piece of Paris' Eiffel Tower, sports and space memorabilia, and a letter from Mayor Richard J. Daley.
• This building was announced as The John Hancock Center. Then, the original developer could not afford to finish construction of this building. John Hancock insurance company took over the project and finished construction because it didn't want its name associated with a failed project.
• Older photographs of this building show much shorter antennae. They were originally 344 feet tall.
• This building was used in a 1993 Super Bowl commercial for McDonald's.
• This was one of the filming locations for the 2005 movie Stranger Than Fiction.
• In the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, this was the location of Mr. Shirley's office.
• In the August 10, 2010 edition of the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling wrote that the John Hancock Center is so tall that the air at the top is six degrees cooler than the air at the sidewalk level.
• This building once housed a Bonwit Teller luxury department store.
• At the time of its introduction and construction, this building was widely considered a boondoggle and ridiculed for its design and cost.
• This building rests on 239 caissons, each up to 10 feet in diameter.
• 57 of this building's caissons are sunk 200 feet into the ground, almost to the locaL bedrock. The other 182 go down as far as 88 feet.
• At the time this building opened, its residences were the highest in the world.
• This building's steel frame weighs 46,000 tons.
• This building's exterior is coated with black anodized aluminum, and the windows are bronze glass.
• This building has 11,459 windows.
• At the time this building opened, it had the world's highest full-sized pool It lost that title in 2017 to a building in China.

Tourist Tips

• Both the Willis Tower and this building have observation decks. However, this building has the better view. So if time or money are precious you can skip the Willis Tower.
• Long lines form for the observation deck in the warmer months, so it is worth your while to buy tickets in advance.
• You must go down to go up. The entrance to the observatory is below ground. There are plenty of signs directing people down to the entrance, but some people get lost because they find it hard to believe that they need to descend stairs when their goal is 1,000 feet above their heads.

Quotations

The Hancock... looks mighty great from afar, and mighty dorky from the main entrance... Up close, the Hancock is all warts. The south lobby... looks like a Prague train station... The Grand Avenue subway is about as nice and it has gum machines... The north lobby, where people go to live in this thing, is as jolly as a marble-clad boxcar on a siding in Kansas City.

Timeline

Narrative

An iconic presence in a city of architectural icons, the 875 North Michigan rises boldly from the mid-American prairie to cast a cultural shadow much larger than the one it gets from the sun. It is a staple of movies, television newscasts, T-shirts, corporate logos and even children's drawings of Chicago. The building is photographed, idealized, and simplified into its various components and used for all things Chicago. It is visible everywhere, both looming in the distance, and in branding for all sorts of products and logos in the city and suburbs. But once you get beyond a 50-mile radius, the 875's identity begins to fade and become confused with its taller, younger, possibly even better-looking sibling, the Willis Tower.

It's not surprising that the majority of Americans confuse 875 North Michigan with the Willis Tower. Both were erected at roughly the same time. Both are black monoliths. And both are located in hard core fly-over territory. In fact, many tourists from the coasts are surprised to learn that Chicago has not one, but multiple supertowers.

In its simplest form, 875 North Michigan is four vertical beams connected by a series of cross braces forming a square tube. It's perfectly comprehensible to even the most casual observer, and the reason you can sometimes see it scrawled on sidewalks in childrens' chalk doodles. A simple rectangle filled with X's topped by two sticks representing the building's antennae is the symbol of Chicago for millions of people.

The steel exoskeleton actually made construction cheaper. According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, the 100-story building was erected for about what it cost to build a 45-story office building of the era.

875 doesn't fuss with complicated setbacks like other tall structures. Its broad shoulders carry its massive girth all the way to the top. But that's not to say it's merely a box. The tower tapers as it gets higher, an unnecessary use of forced perspective in a skyscraper that is already one of the biggest in the world. The effect is that the glass and steel obelisk appears even taller than it really is.

The construction of this building was a game-changer for Chicago's North Side. Before 1969, North Michigan Avenue was lined with fairly uniform and elegant mid-rise and low-rise buildings that some compared to the look and feel of an Old World city. It's what gave Chicago the nickname Paris on the Prairie. When 875 North Michigan Avenue came online, it ushered in a wave of skyscraper building along the Magnificent Mile that transformed the boulevard into a modern canyon of commerce.

There was originally supposed to be two skyscrapers here, which is why it was originally called John Hancock Center, not the John Hancock Building. The second tower would gave been East of the first, but the developers could not wrest the land at 195 East Delaware Place away from the very private Casino Club. The developers sent a letter about the second tower to then-club president Doris Winterbotham. She ignored the letter and the development went forward with only one tower. The letter in question was found in Winterbotham's papers after she died, and was later publicized by the Chicago Tribune.

Stacking Diagram