What guests are saying
What guests love
- Full-kitchen loft suites with in-unit laundry — comfortable for a couple of nights or a long stay.
- A genuine landmark address a block from Millennium Park, Cloud Gate, the Art Institute, and Michigan Avenue.
- Living inside a piece of architectural history, with Louis Sullivan’s ornament on the façade and Iwan Ries’s century-old cigar lounge in the building.
What to keep in mind
- Right beside the elevated ‘L’ — lively, and some rooms hear the train
- Apartment-style: limited on-site services (no restaurant or bar)
Best for Architecture lovers and independent travelers who want a self-sufficient, apartment-style base in the heart of the Loop.
Summary of guest reviews. Sources: The Adler & Sullivan attribution and the ornament description from the Jewelers’ Building designation report (L-123) (Commission on Chicago Landmarks), pp. 2 and 5. LIVN — Millennium Park Downtown Chicago, Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Preservation Chicago. Photography courtesy of LIVN - Millennium Park Downtown Chicago, used with permission. Designation report: Jewelers' Building (L-123) at Chicago Landmark Reports. Details may change over time.
Why this building matters
Built in 1882 for lumber baron Martin Ryerson and designed by the young firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan — the year after their Wainwright Building in St. Louis and several years before Chicago’s Auditorium — the Jewelers Building (originally the S.A. Maxwell store) is the oldest building in Chicago to carry Sullivan’s signature ornament. Carved flowers and unfurling fernheads run across a façade of brick, limestone, and metal columns. It is the only early Adler & Sullivan work still standing in the Loop — a Chicago Landmark since 1981 and on the National Register since 1974. A meticulous 2021 rehabilitation, supported by historic tax credits and celebrated by Preservation Chicago, re-created the carved stone and ironwork long hidden behind marble panels and restored the lobby’s concealed stained glass and original tile — turning the upper floors into LIVN’s loft suites.
The year Adler and Sullivan became a firm
Louis Sullivan arrived in Dankmar Adler’s office as a draftsman in 1879. Adler had just dissolved an earlier partnership, and work was coming in — the Central Music Hall, the Borden Block, a remodeling of the Grand Opera House. As it piled up, Adler began handing most of the design work to the young man, and in May 1881 the arrangement was formalized into a partnership.
This building went up in 1881–82. It is, in other words, one of the very first things Adler and Sullivan built as Adler and Sullivan.
By 1881 the post-fire Loop had settled into a formula: four- and five-story loft blocks, load-bearing walls, cast-iron columns inside, shops at street level and offices above, a pressed-metal cornice on top and Italianate trim. Martin Ryerson asked for a building of exactly that type. What he got back was the same arrangement wearing a facade the designation report calls “a dramatic departure from others of its type” — polychrome, in red brick, buff terracotta, stone and cast iron, with two brick piers dividing the upper floors into a broad central bay between two narrow ones, and an ornamental parapet instead of the usual metal cornice. Worth noticing from the street: the corner onto the alley is chamfered, cut back at an angle, and detailed to match the narrow bays exactly.
The man who paid for it
Martin Ryerson was born in New Jersey in 1816 and left home at sixteen to go west. He reached Michigan and worked as a fur trader, then clerked in a general store, then bought a sawmill. In 1850 he moved to Chicago and opened an office for a lumber trade that was about to become enormous — the city grew into the center of the American lumber business largely through men like him.
Only late in life, with the fortune already made, did he turn to speculative real estate and start needing architects. He gave Adler and Sullivan four commercial buildings in all; this is one of them.
One footnote the report includes and it would be a shame to leave out. Ryerson’s business partner was Henry Harrison Getty — and in 1890 Louis Sullivan designed the Getty tomb in Graceland Cemetery, one of the most admired small buildings he ever made. The lumber money runs from a Wabash Avenue loft block to a mausoleum that architects still travel to see.
The building’s own designation report makes a claim for it that is easy to miss on the street: it is “the only example of early Adler and Sullivan work remaining in the downtown area,” the Rothschild Store and the Revell Building having both come down in the early 1970s.
The ornament is the reason. The report places it in the first of Sullivan’s three periods, 1873 to 1890, “characterized by stylized plants and flowers” — motifs that “do not overlap and are seen against a smooth background, as evidenced in the panels atop the structure.” It traces the parapet to an unexpected source, calling it “reminiscent of the Egyptoid motifs employed by Frank Furness in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Building in Philadelphia” — Furness being the architect in whose office the young Sullivan had briefly worked.
Drawn from the building’s Chicago Landmark designation report. Read the report →
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