What’s That Building? The Old Cook County Criminal Court

What’s That Building? The Old Cook County Criminal Court

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For the latest installment in our series What’s That Building? Dennis Rodkin of Crain’s Chicago Business digs up stories from the old Cook County Criminal Court building at 54 W. Hubbard Street. 

The six-story Richardsonian Romanesque structure hasn’t been a courthouse since 1929, but for three decades it was home to some of the most scandalous court proceedings in Chicago history, including the trials of Leopold and Loeb, Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Black Sox Scandal and Adolph Luetgert, also known as the Sausage King of Chicago, who murdered his wife and dissolved her body in lye in a sausage vat in his factory on Diversey Avenue.