What’s That Building? 15-19 S. Wabash Ave.
Now referred to simply by its address, the downtown structure’s long history includes several past names, including the S.A. Maxwell Co. store, the Jewelers’ Building and Iwan Ries building.
What’s That Building? 15-19 S. Wabash Ave.
Now referred to simply by its address, the downtown structure’s long history includes several past names, including the S.A. Maxwell Co. store, the Jewelers’ Building and Iwan Ries building.
By Dennis RodkinPatrick Murphy, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who used to work at DePaul, asked WBEZ’s Reset about the building at 15-19 S. Wabash Ave. The address turned out to have layers of history and architectural details going back to at least 1882.
Murphy said he discovered the building because of the second-floor retailer, Iwan Ries, a pipe, tobacco and cigar company that has a lounge where Murphy and colleagues would “talk and smoke every few months.”
Iwan Ries is a good place to start, as the company is the oldest layer of this story. In April 1857, a German immigrant named Emil Hoffman opened a pipe and tobacco store in Chicago. His nephew, Iwan Ries, later took over, and has remained in the family’s hands. The shop is currently run by the fourth and fifth generations, Chuck and Kevin Levi.
The Ries tobacco store was in several locations in its first 110 years, but in 1967 the family bought the Wabash building.
Martin L. Ryerson, a Michigan lumber baron who moved to Chicago and started investing in the city’s real estate, built 15-19 S. Wabash in 1882. He commissioned architecture partners Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.
The building went up the year after Adler and Sullivan designed the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, and several years before they designed the Auditorium in Chicago.
Sullivan, who was not yet the world-famous architect he would become, designed an elaborate façade that mixes brick, carved limestone, metal columns and other materials. The structure is the oldest building in Chicago where Sullivan’s style of floral and natural motifs is evident. There are big perky flowers and long stems carved into the stone, fernheads unraveling on the metal columns.
Passersby can see much of this history on the front of the building, but the part that may be even older is in the basement. A plaque by the front door says Ryerson had the building constructed on an old stone foundation that survived from before the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
There’s little other mention of that claim in any of the dozens of historical writeups of the building, but Kevin Levi took Reset down to see the evidence. Some of the foundation is limestone in blocks of assorted sizes. That’s significant because when Chicago got serious about building taller buildings after the fire, foundations became more carefully engineered and the stone blocks would generally be a uniform size.
So it’s plausible — but not confirmed — the foundation is actually a remnant from before the fire.
One flight up from the basement, the street-level main floor is now vacant. Iwan Ries was in this space for a few decades before moving upstairs. At that time, the Iwan Ries family owned the entire building, and leased the upper floors to users like printing companies, a sound studio and a swanky place called The Millionaires Club, Kevin Levi said. The store’s cigar lounge is now part of the old Millionaires Club, decked out from the 1970s in dark wood paneling and carvings.
In 2015, the Levis sold the building for $3 million, according to the Cook County clerk. It sold again in 2018 to a pair of companies, Peerless Investments based in Elmhurst and Honore Properties based in Noble Square.
Mike Shenouda, head of Honore Properties, said they bought it with a tenant already in place for the upper three floors: Sonder, a San Francisco company that manages short-term rentals around the world. The plan was to rehab the upper floors into residential spaces and find a tenant for the street-level space, keeping Iwan Ries in between on the second floor.
“But it became a bigger project, much bigger than I thought it would be,” Shenouda said.
Because the building is a city landmark and the rehab would be funded in part by historic preservation tax credits, the work all had to be done very meticulously and according to preservation standards, Shenouda added.
The carved stone and metal columns on the exterior had all been covered up with marble panels, he said. In the rehab, they re-created the original carved stone and detailed metal, using old photos as their guide. The Levis found that those same columns continue inside on the second floor but were hidden behind partitions for decades.
In the lobby, Shenouda said, Chuck Levi told them they would find stained glass windows concealed by layers of drywall.
He was right, and they had the windows restored and reinstalled in the lobby. The tile floor that fills the vast empty main level, believed to be original and found under layers of later floors, is all in place.
The rehab cost about $7 million, Shenouda said, much more than he thought it would. But “now I’m glad we did it.”
He should be. The building looks as fancifully detailed and handsome as it must have in 1882.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him on Twitter @Dennis_Rodkin.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him on Instagram @true_chicago.