What guests are saying
What guests love
- The building itself: a skinny, romantic Gothic tower with river and skyline views and a one-of-a-kind silhouette.
- A prime riverfront position at Wacker and Michigan — cross the DuSable Bridge to the Magnificent Mile, or walk to Millennium Park, the Theatre District, and the Riverwalk.
- Smart, contemporary rooms and Club Quarters’ practical touches (app check-in, complimentary essentials) at a sensible nightly rate.
What to keep in mind
- A slender vintage tower — rooms can be compact
- Some lower rooms face adjacent buildings rather than the river
Best for Travelers who want a characterful landmark stay and an unbeatable riverfront-and-Mag-Mile location without a luxury price.
Summary of guest reviews. Sources: Club Quarters Hotel, Wacker at Michigan, Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Preservation Chicago. Photography courtesy of Club Quarters Hotel Wacker at Michigan, Chicago, used with permission. Designation report: Mather Tower (L-142) at Chicago Landmark Reports. Details may change over time.
Why this building matters
The hotel occupies the Mather Tower, completed in 1928 and famous as the most slender high-rise in Chicago — a soaring, Neo-Gothic shaft built for railcar magnate Alonzo Mather. Its terra-cotta tower and octagonal cupola are a beloved fixture of the riverfront skyline at the foot of the Magnificent Mile, and a fine example of the 1920s vertical ambition that defined the Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue corridor.
Forty-two feet at the bottom, ten at the top
Mather Tower is 41 stories: a 24-story base, roughly 65 feet by 100, with a seventeen-story octagonal tower telescoping out of the top of it. The tower is 42 feet across where it starts and about ten feet across at the top of the occupied floors. There is no other building in Chicago like it, and the designation report simply calls it the city’s most slender skyscraper.
That shape is a decision, not an accident. Chicago’s 1923 zoning ordinance let a building rise to 264 feet at the sidewalk and then continue as a tower on a quarter of the lot. Most developers used that allowance to keep their floors as large as possible for as long as possible. The builders here did the opposite: they read the same formula and worked out the tallest, thinnest thing the lot would permit, accepting floor after floor of tiny rooms to get there. It reached 519 feet and was, on completion in 1928, the tallest building in Chicago.
It was meant to have a twin. Alonzo Mather commissioned it in 1926 as one of a pair that would stand at the northern entrance to the Loop; the second tower, on Michigan Avenue, was never built.
Two things it has lost and one it never lost: the original 41-foot crown at the summit is gone, but the white terracotta and its stylized Gothic ornament remain, and the plan is still a slight parallelogram rather than a rectangle — bent to follow the curve of Wacker Drive as it tracks the river.
The cattle-car millionaire and his advertising men
Alonzo C. Mather (1848–1930) was born in New York, a descendant of the Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, and came to Chicago at twenty-seven. In 1881 he founded the Mather Stock Car Company, building railroad cars for livestock that he had designed himself to carry animals more humanely. He went on to improved refrigerator cars for meat, and the firm became one of the largest private railroad car companies in the country. He gave the Art Institute the wing that still carries his name.
Who moved into his tower says something about the shape of it. The early tenants were advertising agencies, art studios, graphic designers, publishers, engineers and architects — and the designation report explains why: in a building this thin, every one of those small offices had excellent daylight. What looks like an extravagance from the street was, for anyone who drew or painted for a living, the entire point.
The same 1923 ordinance produced very different answers elsewhere in the Loop. The Bankers Building used it to cut light courts into the outside of a bulky block; Pendry Chicago’s Carbide and Carbon Building took the same base-and-tower approach as this one. Mather simply pushed it further than anybody else.
Drawn from the building’s Chicago Landmark designation report. Read the report →
Worth stepping inside for
Step into the entrance lobby for its elevator doors and the stairway climbing to the second floor, protected along with the exterior.
Explore more like this
Chicago’s Art Deco hotels · Chicago hotels in historic buildings · historic hotels near Millennium Park