What guests are saying
What guests love
- Awe-inspiring Burnham public spaces — the restored banking halls are some of the grandest hotel interiors in Chicago.
- A polished, full-service JW Marriott with a spa, fine dining, and big, refined rooms.
- A central Loop address on LaSalle Street, walkable to the river, the Art Institute, and the theatre district.
What to keep in mind
- A grand business-district hotel; a quieter block at night
- Among the higher-priced Loop stays
Best for Travelers who want luxury inside a landmark of Chicago’s architectural history, at the heart of the LaSalle Street canyon.
Summary of guest reviews. Sources: JW Marriott (Continental & Commercial National Bank Building), Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Preservation Chicago. Photography courtesy of JW Marriott (Continental & Commercial National Bank Building), used with permission. Designation report: Continental and Commercial National Bank Building (L-250) at Chicago Landmark Reports. Details may change over time.
Why this building matters
Designed by D. H. Burnham & Co. and completed in 1914, this was among the largest and most magnificent bank buildings in the country, a Classical Revival palace of soaring coffered ceilings and stately columns. Its conversion into the JW Marriott — a roughly $396 million restoration led by architect Lucien Lagrange and developer The Prime Group, opened in 2010 — is a flagship example of bringing LaSalle Street’s monumental architecture back to vibrant life. The same landmark holds a second, separate hotel — The LaSalle Chicago — entered from LaSalle Street while the JW Marriott is entered from Adams, so the two share one Burnham building yet feel like entirely distinct hotels.
Burnham against the clock
Daniel Burnham sat on the board of the bank that wanted this building, and the bank held an open competition anyway. He had not meant to enter. The prestige of the thing changed his mind, and he went up against most of the large Chicago firms of the day — Holabird and Roche, Jarvis Hunt, Shepley Rutan and Coolidge, Marshall and Fox among them. Working with Ernest Graham, he put the drawings together in a single month, at Graham’s house, calling in every day. The board chose him on June 5, 1911.
Then the clock started. From September 1, 1911, a new city ordinance would cap new buildings at two hundred feet. Burnham’s design stood at two hundred and sixty. He wrote at the time:
“The permit must be taken out on or before September 1st, because at that date the ordinance confining buildings in this city to two hundred feet in height instead of two hundred and sixty comes into force. No one else can work out and determine the final plan and elevation and I must stick to it day and night until this is accomplished.”
They filed two weeks before the deadline. Burnham died in the spring of 1912, and the building was finished by his successor firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, working faithfully to his design. It opened on April 10, 1914 — and it is one of only two buildings whose design Burnham personally supervised to the end.
What he got for that fight is still the first thing you see: a temple front of giant fluted Doric columns running nearly the width of the LaSalle Street facade and rising three full stories. It is the oldest surviving use of large-scale classical forms among the former bank buildings on LaSalle, and it set the tone the rest of the street followed.
A block of a building
The site was the largest ever assembled for an office building in Chicago, and this was the first privately owned building in the city to occupy an entire block — LaSalle, Wells, Adams and Quincy. Nearly a million square feet, clad in gray terracotta. The New York Times called it one of the largest modern office structures in the world when it opened.
Some of it has gone. The loggia came off within two years and the east entrance was redesigned. In the 1940s structural trouble took the cornice. The great stairs were pulled out for escalators after the war. But the block, the terracotta and that colonnade are all still here, and the building is shared today with the LaSalle Chicago — two hotels behind two different street addresses, in one Burnham bank.
Drawn from the building’s Chicago Landmark designation report. Read the report →
How Burnham became a classicist
The temple front on LaSalle Street needs explaining, because Burnham did not start out as a designer of temples. In the early Burnham & Root years his strength was organization and administration — he was the businessman of the partnership and John Wellborn Root was the designer.
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition changed that, and partly by accident. Burnham was made chief of construction for the fair and Root was appointed chief consulting architect; then Root died suddenly in 1891, and design landed on Burnham as well. He turned for help to prominent Eastern architects — Richard Morris Hunt, and McKim, Mead & White — who worked almost entirely in academic styles like the Classical Revival. Together they built the grandly scaled classical grounds that Chicago remembers as the White City.
The report is direct about what that did for him: the fair established Burnham’s reputation for city planning and classically inspired design. He embraced the style afterward, became a close friend of Charles McKim, and in 1896 traveled abroad for the first time, to see the classical architecture of Greece and Rome with his own eyes. Out of all this he developed a model office building in the Classical Revival style and used it in cities as far apart as New York and San Francisco.
Twenty-one years after the fair, this building opened with three stories of fluted Doric columns across its front. The man who ran the White City was still building it.
Drawn from the building’s Chicago Landmark designation report. Read the report →
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