Chicago is, as one writer put it, a “city of travelers.”1 The city’s sheer sprawl made that moniker inevitable. It also led to the creation of a transportation system that, at its apogee, consisted of a web of streetcars, diesel buses, electrified trolleybuses and elevated railways and subways.
The Chicago Motor Club building was designed and completed within 265 days in 1928 and opened January of the next year. Having been granted National Register status in 1978, the building is widely regarded as one of Chicago’s finest Art Deco style skyscrapers. Between the beginning and ending of
Rogers Park National Bank was founded in 1912. For the five years prior to the construction of this building in 1917, we presume that the bank occupied retail space elsewhere on Clark Street, although this has not been confirmed. Notable as architect Karl Vitzthum’s earliest extant bank design, Rogers
East Side Trust & Savings was founded in 1919, the same year this bank was erected, and suspended operations July 1933. A stock subscription drive allowed the bank to regain enough capital to reopen Feburary 1934. In 1944, the company was reorganized as the South Side Bank and Trust, moving
When Thomas J. Harper, president of the West Town State Bank, opened for business on the morning of May 24th, 1930, he could not have known it would be the last such opening for some time. That day, after spending seventeen years in a two story building on West Madison