“As long as I can remember, Chicago has been besotted by the size of its monuments. Biggest. Tallest. Busiest. This makes the Morrison Hotel — the tallest iteration of which, if it still stood, would have turned 100 next year — twice blessed. At one point, it was the tallest hotel in the world. At another, it was the tallest building ever torn down in America.
“The earliest iteration of the Morrison Hotel was a three-story structure with 21 rooms. It looked like something out of the Old West, a raw dive in a frontier town. The saloon was spittoons, fistfights, and men playing faro.
[After the Great Chicago Fire,] “Orsemus Morrison rebuilt the hotel, then deeded it to his nephew, who sold it to an Indian-born businessman named Harry Moir, who, as was the spirit of the age, renovated, renovated, and renovated again.
“By 1918, the Morrison was 21 stories of luxury: 650 rooms, each with a valet-summoning bell, an en suite bath, and views of the city, the lake out this window, the slaughter yards out that. Smoke rose above the U.S. Steel yard in Gary, the stacks belching out flame. The trains arrived all through the night.
“Moir added the hotel’s 46-story tower in 1925. With more than 2,000 rooms by 1935, the Morrison had become a nexus of Chicago’s social and psychic life, one of the first things travelers saw as they approached from the east, a brick tower rising like Vesuvius from the bottom of the sea.
“The Morrison, which, at some point, changed its name to the Chicagoan, was the Hancock of its time, the Sears Tower. It was the exclamation point that punctuated everything. Then it wasn’t. The rooms, which had been the most modern, the ballrooms, which had been the biggest, the nightclub, which had been the highest, were suddenly passé, superannuated.
“As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, then into the 1960s — it never goes the other way — the hotel, which had been a gem, vanished beneath a forest of even taller towers, just as the ground of the lot had once been overshadowed by oak trees. Rooms that had been state of the art suddenly seemed frowzy.
“It had been the headquarters of the Democratic machine since the 1930s. The original Mayor Daley remained a presence in 1965, making deals and pulling strings, when the new owners announced their decision to raze the joint and replace it with the 60-story black monolith that still occupies the site. It was a bank office and remains a bank office: the Chase Tower.” (Cohen, Chicago Magazine, 10/1/24)