Chicago Board of Trade Building I

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Research record

Chicago Board of Trade Building I · Staged record CTL-PL-0185 · Entity Depth Program · 622 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

The first Chicago Board of Trade Building is a building that exists now only in pictures and in the succession lists, and the building's own institutional history is the graph's verification anchor. The Chicago Board of Trade's history records that construction began in 1882 at the Board's current location, 141 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, and that the building opened on May 1, 1885. It was designed by William W. Boyington — the architect of the Chicago Water Tower — and the Board of Trade has been located at the site since 1885. At the time of its construction, the building's own history states, it was the tallest building in Chicago: the CultureTechLens tallest-buildings chronology records it at 320 feet including its clock tower, with ten stories, in a Renaissance Revival design — figures and style the graph's verification source expressly does not cover and which this entry attributes to the chronology itself. The chronology's tallest-buildings list is also where the building's reign is tracked for this graph: completed 1885, tallest in the city until the tower came down a decade later, and the anchor entry for every Chicago height record that follows it in the sequence.

Height was the building's argument. In the Chicago of 1885 — fourteen years after the Great Fire, in the first decade of the skyscraper — a grain exchange that out-topped every other structure in the city was making a claim about where American commerce lived. The clock tower did the symbolic work, and the tower was also the reign's limit: the reference record states that the Boyington building was the tallest building in Chicago from its construction until its clock tower was removed in 1895 (the master's stored properties give 1894; the staged chronology in this program's Batch 001 follows the reference record's 1895, and this entry does the same, flagging the variance in the batch index). With the tower gone, the height title lapsed with it, and the Board of Trade Building settled into middle age as an office and trading building at the foot of LaSalle Street. Its construction was of its transitional moment: period accounts describe the early Chicago towers as built of a brick shell mass and covered with limestone, the masonry era's answer to height before the steel frame fully took over — Boyington's building among them, its ten stories carried on load-bearing walls skinned in stone.

The end was structural, not symbolic. The building's history states that it was rendered structurally unsound in the 1920s; the reference record dates its demolition to 1929. It was replaced on the same site — the graph's next record, the Chicago Board of Trade Building II — by the Art Deco tower that opened in 1930 and still stands. Nothing of Building I survives above ground: its afterlife is the sequence of facts it anchors, as the first permanent home of the Board of Trade at Jackson and LaSalle, the city's tallest building for a decade, and the predecessor whose failure made the current landmark necessary.

For CultureTechLens the record's interest is documentary discipline as much as architecture. The master verification states plainly what its source does and does not support: the site, the construction start, the opening date, and the tallest-at-construction claim are verified; the height, the story count, the tower-removal date, and the end of the tallest period are not covered by that source. This entry has kept those two classes of fact separate — chronology figures attributed to the chronology, institutional facts to the Board's own history — and the batch index carries the tower-date variance (1894 in the stored properties, 1895 in the reference record and in Batch 001's staged list) for the merge pass, rather than silently choosing.

Sources for this record

• History — Chicago Board of Trade Building — Chicago Board of Trade Building (cbotbuilding.com)
  Claims supported: Master verification source: The first Chicago Board of Trade Building existed as an office/trading building at the Board of Trade's current location, 141 W. Jackson Blvd, Chicago; construction began in 1882 and it opened on May 1, 1885; at the time of its construction it was the tallest building in Chicago; it was rendered structurally unsound in the 1920s and replaced on the same site by the current (1930) building. The source does not cover height, stories, the tower-removal date or the tallest-period end year
• Chicago Board of Trade Building — Wikipedia
  Claims supported: A building designed by William W. Boyington stood at the location from 1885 to 1929; the CBOT has been located at the site since 1885; the Boyington building was the tallest building in Chicago from its construction until its clock tower was removed in 1895; it became unsound in the 1920s and was demolished in 1929, replaced by the current Holabird & Root building
• Chicago Board of Trade Building (What Was the Tallest Building in Chicago in 1933?) — Lindsay Fullerton
  Claims supported: Period description of the early Chicago towers, Boyington's Board of Trade building among them, as built of a brick shell mass covered with limestone and towering ten stories; the building was the tallest in Chicago until its tower was truncated

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 004–008). Source: CultureTechLens