The Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and the Economies of Ornament

By the fall of 1971, all efforts to save the Chicago Stock Exchange Building had failed and a demolition permit had been issued for the formidable 1893 work of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. While the building had made it past a favorable vote by the Chicago Landmarks Commission, the Chicago City Council was unwilling to grant it landmark status—the final step in designation. Lawsuits filed in county and state courts by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (now Landmarks Illinois), an organization that formed around advocating for the building’s preservation, were unsuccessful. Despite public protests and earnest pleas that the demolition of the building would mean the loss of yet another significant early Chicago skyscraper, a ring of scaffolding appeared around the building; it would be coming down.

The Chicago Stock Exchange Building had been sold to 30 North LaSalle Street Partnership in 1971 with the understanding that the City Council would not grant landmark status in order to encourage economic development in the Central Business District, which meant, in part, replacing obsolete buildings. “The people who want to preserve landmarks should be willing to pay for it,” said co-owner of the building William J. Friedman to the Chicago Tribune in an interview in October 1971.¹ This comment was a matter of profit and economics, as the 30 North LaSalle Street Partnership planned to replace the 13-story Chicago Stock Exchange Building with a new, 43-story office building.

By October 1971, Three Oaks Wrecking Company had begun ripping out the building’s insides and pulling down the building’s decorative terracotta ornament. While 30 North LaSalle Street Partnership technically owned the property, Three Oaks Wrecking owned the salvaged materials. Taking over an empty storefront in the building, the company began selling pieces of salvaged ornament as it was removed.²

In 1966, Sudler & Company, the previous owners of the Chicago Stock Exchange, had spent $500,000 to modernize the building—the final intervention to the building before it would be razed less than a decade later. Hiring architects Branner, Danforth and Rockwell, Sudler & Company reconfigured the entrance, adding revolving doors and filling in a window above the building’s arched entrance with bronze grill work. Inside the building’s lobby, outdated white marble was replaced with modern travertine, and open cage elevators were enclosed and outfitted with clean finished bronze doors. Sections of geometric cast iron grille work once used to enclose the elevators were salvaged and reinstalled as decorative elements in the lobby. The work was given a Citation of Merit by the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.³

Ornament salvaged from the Chicago Stock Exchange was also appearing elsewhere in the US, demonstrating the importance of the building both as a whole, and in parts that expressed Sullivan’s design philosophy. In 1963, architect Paul Rudulph had utilized two sections of elevator grille to enclose the facility offices at the newly constructed Brutalist Art and Architecture Building at Yale. Elevator grille work had also found its way to Southern Illinois University, as far west as University of Southern California, and into the hands of both institutions and individual collectors. In Chicago, the 1966 Stock Exchange Building modernization provided an opportunity for the Art Institute of Chicago to increase its collection of Louis Sullivan-designed architectural salvage, which had developed after the Art Institute was given the first selection of items salvaged from Adler and Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, demolished in 1961. Through Sudler & Company, the Art Institute acquired kickplates, mail slots, and some of the many elevator grills salvaged from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, which would chart a course for an even larger architectural salvage acquisition: the Stock Exchange Trading Room.

The acquisition of the Stock Exchange Trading Room and its reinstallation inside a new, specially designed Art Institute gallery is a representation of a rare and unique framework of partnerships between government, cultural institutions, and the private sector. The Stock Exchange Trading Room is a demonstration of the creativity and craft of the first wave of preservation architecture, when the field gathered the tradespeople, photographers, researchers, and designers that would establish a direction for understanding how buildings of the past were to be explained in a contemporary context.

The Stock Exchange Trading Room, now reaching its forty-ninth year being on view at the Art Institute, sits within an area being assessed for a potential gallery expansion following a $75 million dollar gift intended to fund new exhibition spaces. The Art Institute claims it has made no decision in terms of the Stock Exchange Trading Room, while stating, forebodingly, that if the expansion does affect the space, that the Art Institute would work with preservation groups to find a new home for it.

As the Chicago Stock Exchange was being considered for Landmark status in 1969, it was the cumulation of changes over time—including the 1966 Branner, Danforth and Rockwell alterations—that proved important. The alterations provided Lewis H. Hill, who led the city’s Department of Urban Renewal prior to becoming Department of Planning and Development commissioner, with an additional justification to reject its landmark status and bolster the future owner’s claims that the value was in the economic potential of the land, and not in the existing building. In a report to the Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks, Hill wrote, “The building has undergone substantial changes from its original use, suffered obsolescence, and incurred significant conversion.” Of the Old Chicago Stock Exchange’s Trading Room, Hill wrote, “The great exchange room that the three floor arched façade expresses is gone. This unique interior space that may have established the building as having a distinct visual feature was removed over fifty years ago.”⁴

Hill’s report on the condition of the Chicago Stock Exchange and its Trading Room could have been an exaggeration, or an assumption based on a superficial understanding of the building, yet the message, delivered along with an economic argument that the building’s preservation was not viable, was clear enough to convince the Chicago City Council that there was not enough original material present to make a definitive argument for protecting it.

But Hill’s assessment was incorrect. The Stock Exchange Trading Room was still there, hidden under decades of changes in use and design. The Chicago Stock Exchange left the building after reaching the end of their original fifteen-year, rent-free lease in 1908. The Foreman Brothers Banking Company would take over the Trading Room, hiring architects Frost and Granger to adapt the room as a banking hall. This adaptation, like subsequent ones to the Trading Room, would largely be a matter of addition, not subtraction. Frost and Granger added marble cashiers and tellers counters, and encased the columns and wainscoting to match. Chandeliers were dropped from the ceiling, and some of the colorful Sullivan stenciling on the wall was painted.⁵ After a period of vacancy during the Great Depression, the Trading Room became the home of Bell Federal Savings and Loan, who installed an air conditioning system, requiring the installation of an acoustic dropped ceiling to hide the ducts and equipment. Placed below the elaborate column capitals, the ceiling would conceal—and protect—Sullivan’s ornate plaster column capitals, colorful stenciling, and cast iron frame filled with leaded glass panels for decades.

It was this iteration of the Stock Exchange Trading Room, with its additions and adaptations over time, and acoustic ceiling hiding an architectural treasure, that architect John Vinci encountered in 1971. Vinci had worked for Branner, Danforth and Rockwell during the period that the Chicago Stock Exchange was being renovated and had also joined photographer and Sullivan expert Richard Nickel in salvaging ornament from the Garrick Theater in the early 1960s. Nickel had been furious about the modernization of the Stock Exchange in 1966, and had encouraged Vinci to quit. “But, of course, I liked my job, and I was a good employee,” shared John Vinci in a phone interview.⁶ “So I helped with the remodeling.” Vinci continues, “At that time, I had connections that would get Richard jobs, and he needed the work, so he ended up photographing the results of the remodeling. I think the AIA award was due, in part, to his beautiful photographs.”

By 1970, John Vinci began working with architect Lawrence Kenny, operating the office of Vinci/Kenny out of a storefront at 541 Diversey Parkway. Despite architectural salvage already in the collection of the Art Institute, the museum was reluctant to get involved in the Chicago Stock Exchange until it was clear that the building would be demolished. As the building was coming down, Art Institute of Chicago curator of American Decorative Arts David Hanks approached Vinci about salvaging fragments from the building, as the museum was being offered whatever they wanted from the building. Vinci told Hanks he was tired of saving bits and pieces and recommended that the Art Institute take the whole Trading Room, its key features hidden under the drop ceiling.

John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny, along with a team that included Richard Nickel, architect Crombie Taylor, and paint analysis expert Robert A. Furhoff, had the responsibility of documenting, dismantling, and eventually recreating the Trading Room, which by 1971 had been used by the United Service Organization as a social center for military personnel. Workers began pulling down the air conditioning equipment above the dropped ceiling, revealing the colorful stencils and glass above. With the Trading Room briefly returned to its original dimensions, the Art Institute of Chicago commissioned detailed measured drawings to be submitted to the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), a supplement to photographs taken for the HABS program in 1963. With financial support from the City of Chicago, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago Trustee Suzette Morton Davidson, and Three Oaks Wrecking Company, the Art Institute would be gifted original elements from the Stock Exchange Trading Room. Over three months, the team documented and removed all the original fabric within the room. Leaded glass panels were cataloged and removed, and their cast iron mullions were unbolted. Plaster column capitals were carefully dismantled. The colorful stencils, which were applied to both canvas and directly onto the plaster surface of the walls and ceiling, were detached from their surfaces. While most of the original material below the acoustic ceiling had been damaged or removed, enough material existed above it to determine the color, pattern, and finish of the missing components. On January 31, 1972, the last fragments were removed and transported to the Art Institute.

Working out of the Vinci/Kenny office, Lawrence Kenny created drawings of the Trading Room in order to understand its construction, its deconstruction, and how to put the components back together inside an entirely new room. The Stock Exchange Trading Room represented innovations in engineering and design that made the architectural ornamentation possible. To address the Stock Exchange’s need for an unobstructed trading floor with minimal columns, Dankmar Adler transferred the weight of the upper floors into a series of steel trusses supported by the trading room’s four columns, creating a braced box on the second and third floors that carried the weight of the eleven floors above. The locations of the steel trusses would dictate the location of each cast iron mullion within the ceiling, a superb expression of Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function” dictum. The room was illuminated via a combination of intermittently placed incandescent light bulbs and radial fixtures, as well as a set of skylights that utilized panels of prism glass to reflect light, illuminating the art glass. In addition to the Trading Room, the Art Institute also acquired another massive fragment: the Stock Exchange’s exterior arch. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had originally offered to purchase the entire LaSalle Street façade up to the fifth floor, which included the entry arch and the arcade, but the City of Chicago refused to give up its option on the arch, so it went to the Art Institute. As an alternative, the Metropolitan Museum purchased two flights of interior stairways and incorporated them into their new American Decorative Arts wing.⁷

After the Stock Exchange Trading Room had been dismantled and removed, Richard Nickel continued to salvage material from the building with permission from Three Oaks Wrecking Company. On April 13, 1972, Nickel went missing while inside the Stock Exchange. Three weeks later, on May 10, Nickel’s body was found buried in the rubble. After Richard Nickel’s death, the demolition of the Stock Exchange took on an allegorical quality, and imparted the reconstruction of the Trading Room, to which he lent his services as a photographer and a salvager, with a substantial weight.

While the Trading Room components remained in storage at the Art Institute, grants from the Graham Foundation and the Walter E. Heller Foundation, through its president Alyce DeCosta, provided funding for the reconstruction inside a new wing of the museum designed by Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Within the modern addition, Netsch would design a vessel for the Trading Room and determine the orientation and design of the salvaged arch. Working within budgetary constraints, Walter Netsch originally designed the Stock Exchange Trading Room interior to be filled on a diagonal, leaving the remainder of the room raw. Netsch’s insistence that half of the Trading Room could be constructed caused conflict between Netsch and Vinci, yet ultimately Vinci was able to go back to Alyce DeCosta and ask for additional funds to complete the room.⁸ In order to accurately portray the Stock Exchange Trading Room’s original condition, Vinci maintained that it would need to be placed in its original orientation and provided with natural light through skylights and east facing windows. With the completion of the architecture of the space, the work to reconstruct the Trading Room began in March 1976.

As the shape for the new coffered ceiling emerged, the surfaces were prepared for the stencils and plaster ornamentation. Robert Furhoff’s work to investigate, clean, and repair the stencils revealed fifteen individual patterns, the most complex of which had fifty-two different colors. Working with a team of stencil cutters, artisans, and painters, Furhoff recreated all the missing patterns on canvas for ease of installation. The results of the recreated stencils were so successful that a decision was made to place original stencil work only within a coffer at the west end of the room.⁹

Enough sections of the plaster freeze with the Chicago Stock Exchange initials were salvaged to install these original components along the south and west faces of two of the truss beams. Two original column capitals out of the four were reinstalled, their gold leaf retouched, while two new capitals were recast, and new gold leaf was applied. All but one of the column capitals within the gallery area were irreparable after being buried within a wall, yet the intact column provided the material necessary to make a model to recast the damaged columns and their capitals. The surfaces of the columns had originally been clad in scagliola, a process of applying plaster and pigments to a surface to evoke the visual effects and texture of marble. Much of the 1893 scagliola on the columns had been damaged, but enough of it remained to match the mottling and color of a new scagliola finish. Almost lost as a process in the United States by the 1970s, an artisan in California was identified that could recreate the scagliola.

Ninety percent of the cast iron mullions supporting the art glass panels were salvaged, cleaned, and reinstalled. Twenty percent of the original art glass would be replaced, a process that proved difficult as the glass had to be fabricated to order, delaying the project for a year.¹⁰

New hardware and door handles were cast in bronze from molds made of original elements and finished to emulate the color and texture of a rust-resistant coating that was used by Adler and Sullivan. Sections of an original window frame, made of mahogany, had been salvaged, but no wainscoting remained, requiring the team to carefully determine the placement and detailing of the wainscoting through looking at earlier photographs of the room in situ. To finish the room, chalkboards for stock exchange quotations and a clock were installed on the north wall, and light fixtures with carbon filament bulbs were recreated from photographs and hung below the column capitals. The recreated Stock Exchange Trading Room opened with a gala on April 6, 1977, that honored Alyce DeCosta and Three Oaks Wrecking Company.

The Stock Exchange Trading Room is a museum collection item that visitors can walk through, a rare immersive experience that brings the black and white vintage photographs and drawings of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building to life, and awakens a sense of scale in terms of how the Trading Room would have fit inside the building for which it was built. That scale also illustrates the wastefulness of demolition, clarifying the volume of materials fated for landfills when replacing the city’s nineteenth-century skyscrapers was considered better than saving them.

Under similarly cynical—and cyclical—circumstances, the tropes that Commissioner Lewis H. Hill used to justify the lack of integrity and value of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building have been recycled by Art Institute of Chicago president James Rondeau to advance the idea that the Trading Room is not original and is not worth preserving. After Preservation Chicago placed the Stock Exchange Trading Room on its annual list of Chicago’s most endangered buildings, the Art Institute responded, stating that it had no plans to dismantle the Trading Room but that if it did, it would work with preservation groups to find it a new home. The existence of a conditional alternative in the Art Institute’s retort hints that the museum is optioning the removal of the Stock Exchange Trading Room—and is therefore preparing to manage the consequences. This intention was further substantiated when James Rondeau answered a question about the Trading Room after a panel discussion at City Club Chicago on March 5, 2026. Reiterating the institution’s statement that the Art Institute had “no approved plan to touch the Trading Room,” Rondeau then claimed that only five percent of museum visitors went to the Trading Room and then chose to discredit its very nature. “There is a bit of a compromise around the narrative around historic preservation, which is so important in our city, and in the case of the Trading Room, it is not an example of historic preservation. The only thing that is being preserved is a volume and a sense of a spirit. But it’s not a historic site. It’s a recreation from 1977.”¹¹

Invalidating the importance of a place within historic preservation or overanalyzing what is original versus what is not is a strategy that is already being deployed by James Rondeau to facilitate the destruction of the Trading Room, a place that was saved from the Chicago Stock Exchange, a building that was demolished under the same false claims of lack of importance and original materials. The demolition of the Chicago Stock Exchange is broadly understood as an error in judgement.

The removal of the Trading Room would be a metastasis of the same justifications that brought the Chicago Stock Exchange down in 1972. Like the efforts to save the building, which were not without complications, ensuring that the Trading Room remains by forcing the Art Institute to do so will require complex negotiations. The Art Institute of Chicago is the second largest museum in North America and is a key tourist destination; it also sits on land owned by the City of Chicago and administered by the Chicago Park District. Despite Rondeau’s statement that the Trading Room is a reconstruction, this fact makes it no less significant, and neither does its age.

Ironically, in December 2025, 30 North LaSalle, the building that replaced the Chicago Stock Exchange in 1977, was presented to the Chicago Landmarks Commission for landmark status. Unlike the building that it replaced, 30 North LaSalle was not brought to the local landmarks process because of its architectural significance, but by the appeal of financial incentives that have been shaped to preserve and build financial capital. This initiative was driven solely by the desire by the owners to make more money, and like the conditions around the demolition of the Chicago Stock Exchange, the City of Chicago gave the owners what they wanted. While the current owners of 30 North LaSalle were not responsible for the loss of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, granting them landmark status in the fifty-year shadow of that loss tells future owners that the desecration of landmarks carries no consequences.

30 North LaSalle was designed by Texas architect Thomas E. Stanley, as the culture of architecture in Chicago in the early 1970s was such that no architect was willing to associate themselves with the creation of a new building on such a contested site. An example of lifeless corporate modernism by design, 30 North LaSalle is as architecturally insignificant as the choice to landmark it is ethically bankrupt. To justify how 30 North LaSalle meets established criteria for designation, a claim was made that the site—and therefore the building—held the history of the demolition of the Stock Exchange as a galvanizing movement for preservation in Chicago, and that the “campaign that developed around the demolition of the Stock Exchange raised public awareness of the importance of the city’s historic architecture.”¹² This is a misapplied argument; an example of the way in which knowledge and research can be repurposed in unscrupulous ways. Ultimately, the decision to landmark 30 North LaSalle in 2025 will be remembered as shamefully as the decision to not landmark the Chicago Stock Exchange Building in 1971.

Rondeau’s claim that only five percent of Art Institute visitors see the Trading Room is a speculative number, but he might not be far off, as the Art Institute has left the Trading Room under programmed, challenging to find, and difficult to discover for visitors that might not be aware of it. When the Stock Exchange Trading Room opened, it was presented as an asset to the museum; a programmable venue for both events and exhibitions, and most importantly, as a moment of cultural pride for Chicago that signaled the Art Institute’s investment in the city’s architecture. Yet, nearly fifty years later, the Trading Room finds itself neglected by the very institution that saved it. While the Art Institute might claim that there are no official plans, the intimation is made more obvious by the way in which the Trading Room is treated within the museum’s walls. The creation of The Modern Wing in 2009, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop in collaboration with Interactive Design Inc., reconfigured the galleries around the Trading Room, obfuscating its location. While other architectural fragments within the Art Institute’s collection have been rehung and reinterpreted to better contextualize their existence in the context of an art museum, the Trading Room has not been given the same treatment. A lack of meaningful or attractive wayfinding to get visitors to the Trading Room is also telling; it’s easier to find The Modern Wing’s cafe or gift shop.

The Art Institute houses many other kinds of collection items outside of fine art that allow for the reconstruction of an element of the past; a visitor needs to look no further than the many ancient Greek and Roman statues with reconstructed limbs—or no limbs at all—to see examples of this. The Art Institute also continues to acquire and interpret individual architectural fragments and ornament, a collection that began in the mid 1960s after the Garrick Theater was demolished. In 2023, the Art Institute reinstalled some of these fragments in a permanent exhibition titled Architectural Fragments from Chicago. The fragments and ornament were rehung in an artful, contemporary manner, and new labels that worked to contextualize the fragments within an architectural, social, and cultural context were created to help visitors understand these collection items. While these collection items have been given a fresh perspective, the Stock Exchange Trading Room remains a failure of interpretation. Two lifeless paragraphs of wall text are all that interpret the room, which is entered through a frame of double doors, only one cocked open. The shades are pulled down halfway.

“And then you walk into this room, and there is nowhere to sit!” exclaims John Vinci, who designed thirty-six chairs for the Stock Exchange Trading Room based on historic photographs, none of which remain in the room. “And there is no one to tell you about what the architecture is about,” Vinci continues.¹³ The emptiness of the room, absence of didactics, and the lack of seating delivers an experience that doesn’t encourage a visitor to look or linger.

As a historic interior, the Trading Room within the Art Institute is now threatened in the same way that other interiors are imperiled by changes in taste. In 1893, the Stock Exchange Trading Room’s design, with its elaborate stencils and leaded glass, were in fashion; by the late 1960s, they were out, in favor of clean lines and minimal modernism. While earthy palates have begun to take over the beiges and grays that have been so prominent, there has yet to be a return to an era where interior design embraces busy, ornate ornamentation, and fifty-two-color stencils.

A similar collaboration to the one that occurred to reconstruct the Trading Room is unlikely to happen again—with or without the consultation of preservation groups. It is unlikely that an institution will be found with the interest, the resources, and the space to save the Trading Room again. It is even more unlikely for that institution to be in Chicago.

The Art Institute of Chicago as a steward of preservation and of architecture has a responsibility to treat the Stock Exchange Trading Room as the significant piece of Chicago history that it is, not by deaccessioning it and making it another institution’s problem, but by embracing it as a collection item and a cultural asset. The Stock Exchange Trading Room merits a full calendar of engaging events, not just the occasional wedding, including as a space for discourse on architecture and preservation and as a venue to encourage forward thinking in the discipline, whether that thinking is about creativity and workmanship, or the significance of partnerships. This is the only path forward for the Stock Exchange Trading Room, which was already saved from destruction once, and shouldn’t need to be saved again.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nathaniel Parks and Dave Hofer at the Art Institute of Chicago Archives and to John Vinci.