Marshall Field Company Store

About this property

The Marshall Field and Company Building is a department store building and National Historic Landmark on State Street in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It was designed in the Beaux-Arts and Commercial style by Daniel Burnham for Marshall Field; the north end (including the columned entrance) was built in 1901–1902, and the south end in 1905–1906. It was the flagship store of the Marshall Field's department store chain until The May Department Stores Company was acquired by Federated Department Stores and converted the store to Macy's in 2006, and remains the Midwest Macy's flagship store. The building is located in the Chicago Loop area of the downtown central business district and it takes up the entire city block bounded clockwise from the west by North State Street, East Randolph Street, North Wabash Avenue, and East Washington Street. Field and partners founded their Chicago store in 1852, and first built an expansive shopping emporium on this site in 1868. The 1901 building was the fourth for the department store at this site. Marshall Field's established numerous important business "firsts" in this building and in the series of previous elaborate decorative structures on this site for the last century and a half, and it is regarded as one of the three most influential establishments in the nationwide development of the department store and in the commercial business economic history of the United States. The name of the stores formerly headquartered at this building changed on September 9, 2006, as a result of the merger that produced Macy's, Inc. and led to the integration of the Marshall Field's stores into the Macy's now-nationwide retailing network. The building, which is the third largest store in the world, was both declared a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 2, 1978, and it was designated a Chicago Landmark on November 1, 2005. The building architecture is known for its multiple atria (several balconied atrium - "Great Hall") and for having been built in stages over the course of more than two decades. Its ornamentation includes a mosaic vaulted ceiling designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a pair of well-known outdoor street-corner clocks at State and Washington, and later at State and Randolph Streets, which serve as symbols of the store since 1897.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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