Time was when Chicago news ediTors used to dismiss stories with little local relevance by saying, “It’s a long way from State and Madison.”
These days, State and Madison is a long way from the old State and Madison. The one-time “world’s busiest corner” isn’t quite what it used to be.
“No way,” said Freeda Kosick, the 20-year manager of a currency exchange tucked in below the stairs in the grimy lobby of the desolate, nearly empty Chicago Building on the southwest corner of the famous intersection.
“Thirty-five or 40 years ago it was real, real busy. But downtown has changed a lot,” she said.
All downtowns have changed since the suburbanization of America sucked buyers out of the central cities and into the shopping malls, and State and Madison is no exception. The city’s street numbers still start there, but for most people in the Chicago area, thoughts of shopping start elsewhere.
But changes aren’t always for the worse, and recently the intersection has taken on a new look, demonstrating that a good part of its vibrancy and appeal still survive.
The long-empty Wieboldt’s store on the northeast corner has been spiffed up by a new owner as 1 N. State, with Filene’s Basement and T.J. Maxx as lead retailers.
And the wreckers are busy demolishing the building just south of the Chicago Building on State Street to make way for a Toys “R” Us store scheduled to open next Christmas.
Michael Miller, senior vice president for real estate at Toys “R” Us headquarters in Paramus, N.J., didn’t know people used to refer to the corner as the “world’s busiest.”
But, he said, “we think it’s a very heavily traveled intersection.”
The luring of suburban-type retailers such as T.J. Maxx and Toys “R” Us marks another turn for the intersection, whose history began when Chicago pioneer Potter Palmer decided to turn downtown 180 degrees by changing its retailing focus from east-west to north-south.
Until the late 1860s, stores gathered along Lake Street, a muddy thoroughfare parallel to the Chicago River. But Palmer, an industrious dry goods merchant from New York, had a vision for what was called the Old State Road.
Though derided by contemporaries, Palmer began to buy up cheap land occupied by shanties and amassed a mile of frontage along State with the idea of turning it into a dazzling retail strip.
By 1870, he had developed more than 30 buildings along State Street, anchored by a six-story retail store known as the “Marble Palace” at State and Washington that housed the dry goods company that Palmer had sold to Marshall Field and Levi Leiter.
The 1871 Chicago Fire destroyed all his State Street holdings, but Palmer built again on an even more lavish scale, establishing the State Street corridor as Chicago’s premier shopping artery, with his new-and fireproof-Palmer House Hotel at State and Monroe.
The early 1900s marked the golden era for State and Madison.
The landmark Carson Pirie Scott store on the southeast corner, designed originally by Louis Sullivan and finished off by Daniel Burnham in a one-two punch of great Chicago architects, was completed in 1905, making State and Madison the hub of a retailing promenade.
The shopping stretch extended at least from Randolph, where the Marshall Field Store stood, to Adams, site of the Fair Store. (The latter was an 1800s version of a discount store, and the building in 1965 became the Montgomery Ward store, which was demolished in 1985.)
The 16-story Chicago Building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1904 with a design by the firm of Holabird and Roche.
The northwest corner of State and Madison was occupied by the Boston Store, a retail establishment dating to 1873 that took over 17-story quarters built over a period between 1905 and 1917.
In 1912, a Mandel Brothers store opened on the northeast corner, and Chas. A. Stevens also moved in. Wieboldt’s later took over the site from Mandel Brothers.
With a few changes, primarily the conversion of the Boston Store to combined retail and office space, the intersection maintained its vitality through the 1950s, its luster only mildly dimmed by the Depression and World War II. In 1939, a government survey showed 265,376 pedestrians and 24,898 autos poured through it in a 12-hour period.
As late as 1959, the Chicago Transit Authority proclaimed State and Madison the busiest corner in the Loop, with 178,021 pedestrians and 20,014 motor vehicles moving through in an 11-hour period. The “world’s busiest corner” sobriquet was still common currency.
But by the 1970s, State Street was perceived as locked in a losing battle with the customer-devouring suburban shopping center behemoths. Caught up in mall fever, the city widened the retail artery and banned autos, transforming it into an Eden for buses, pigeons and street evangelists-but not particularly for shoppers.
By 1990, the corner’s fortunes seemed to have reached their nadir. The Wieboldt’s and Stevens stores were closed, Carsons had been acquired by financially shaky P.A. Bergner & Co. (which filed for bankruptcy in 1991) and talk of demolition was swirling around the Chicago Building. The offices on the remaining corner were occupied by government agencies such as the Chicago Housing Authority-not exactly the most glamorous tenant.
But for the Tucker Companies, a Northbrook-based commercial real estate firm, the name State and Madison still had magic, and the firm bought the Wieboldt’s store building in April of 1990.
“State and Madison has always been the hottest psychological phrase to Chicago real estate people,” said Norris Eber, Tucker’s senior vice president of asset management. “It was always a buzzword as I grew up in this town.
“It appeared to deteriorate in the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s always been a buzzword as the ultimate intersection, the zero-zero line,” he said.
Eber said that even though the Wieboldt’s space, occupying the first four floors of the 16-story building, had been unoccupied for four years, the rest of the building was leased up to office tenants.
“What we saw was the opportunity to capture the location and the people around it by going to the simple philosophy of retail merchandising with storefronts on the street,” Eber said. “The doubting Thomases said, `Why State Street?’ We said we thought it always had been a great location and again could be.”
Tucker put $78 million into the building, comprising the purchase price and a $25 million redevelopment, and the company’s highest expectations were more than met with TJ Maxx and Filene’s Basement, Eber said.
Not only is weekday traffic bountiful at rush hour and lunchtime, but weekends-even Sundays-have been “fantastic,” he said. The State Street storefronts are all leased and all but one on Madison and one on Wabash are occupied or in lease negotiation, Eber added.
Meanwhile, W. Harris Smith, the owner of the lease on the Chicago Building property, remains committed to a plan for a $5 million renovation that would convert it to 48 rental apartments plus retail stores on the lower two floors.
Smith, president of Creative Construction, bought a 50-year lease on the property, which is owned by the Board of Education. The site included adjacent land now being prepared for the new Toys “R” Us.
He is still searching for financing for the Chicago Building project, saying he is “relatively confident” it will come this year. At the same time, national mass appeal retailers commonly found in suburban shopping malls are expressing “tremendous demand” for storefronts on the corner, he added.
“I think in the recent past there has been a realization that State Street is not going to be the premier retail street in the city. That has been given over to North Michigan Avenue,” he said.
“But in the most perfect scenario, State Street would evolve into a second-tier shopping street, and things are beginning to happen that may make that come to fruition. The Toys “R” Us deal is one of those things,” he added.
More evidence of State’s healthy second-tier status came in a marketing analysis done a year ago that said State Street was the third most frequently shopped location in the area, after Woodfield Shopping Center in Schaumburg and Water Tower Place on North Michigan.
Smith also noted that the State-and-Madison hub has been strengthened by the construction of the Harold Washington Library as a southern anchor, the renovation of the old Goldblatt’s store at Jackson and the $120 million Field’s renovation on the north end of the retail strip.
And he takes further encouragement from plans for a $30 million “de-malling” of State Street and the routing of light rail cars down State as part of the downtown circulator system, which is scheduled to start service in 1998.
“The circulator will be a tourist attraction,” he said. “Additionally, it’s generally agreed that the malling of State Street was a mistake.”
State Street merchants (many of whom backed the original malling of State a dozen years ago) now want the cars back and the sidewalks narrower to bring back the hustle-bustle air.
“People like to be in a crowd, especially at holiday season,” said G. Brent Minor, chairman of the State Street Council and vice president of LaSalle Talman Bank.
“If you spread a sidewalk to two, three times as wide and spread the people, it doesn’t bring the element of excitement that it used to have,” he said.
Carsons is also looking forward to better days, with its parent, Milwaukee-based Bergner, reporting high operating profits and expecting to emerge from Chapter 11 this spring. State Street store director John Kline said he is hoping soon to begin a revamping of the store’s first floor.
Meanwhile, in her burrow under the Chicago Building stairway, Freeda Kosick is quite content with her location. “Business isn’t down in the currency exchange; it has increased,” she said.
Her problem is that redevelopment of the building, in which she is one of three remaining businesses along with a jewelry store and a restaurant, could mean she gets booted out. “Eventually they’ll have to do something with it,” she said.
Her assistant, Trudy Doke, a clerk there for nine years, also sees a comeback for State and Madison.
“In the coming years maybe there will be a complete new look here,” she said. “There’s always hope.”
