Jonathan Cohen's photos

... with the Board of Trade Building in the right-hand background.

This building was the warehouse of Montgomery Ward Company. Designed by Schmidt, Garden and Martin in the early 1900’s, its horizontal emphasis and geometric ornamentation reflect the Prairie Style often associated with Frank Lloyd Wright. Montgomery Ward, the Chicago-based retail company, began its existence in 1872 as a dry-goods mail order business. They specialized in shipping goods to rural and suburban customer who could not easily come into a big city like Chicago to shop. In its heyday, the Montgomery Ward catalog offered both small essentials, like soap or clothes, and gargantuan products, like an entire house. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the company had outgrown its original operations in the Loop and decided to build its own corporate campus. In 1908, Montgomery Ward built a new warehouse in order to handle the massive work of receiving, processing, and shipping millions of catalog orders. It rises eight stories and hugs the North Branch of the Chicago River for over 1,000 feet. 600 West Chicago was the largest re-enforced concrete building in the world upon its completion. According to information from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the commercial operations within this gigantic building were vast. In order to handle the shipping demands, 600 West Chicago housed its own U.S. Post Office branch. To supplement that, the ground floor had a shipping platform with berths for up to twenty-four railroad freight cars. Miles of chutes, conveyors, and storage lofts moved goods around inside the building. All of this was before the age of email, so the building had an interior infrastructure for getting message to different floors. Montgomery Ward hired couriers, nicknamed "pickers," who would roller skate around the building to deliver messages and packages. For decades, 600 West Chicago was home to the massive work of shipping and processing orders and storing goods. Eventually, Montgomery Ward left the catalog business in favor of department store retail. In honor of its place in the commercial history of the country, 600 West Chicago was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2000. After the bankruptcy of Montgomery Ward in 2001, the earliest buildings were converted into upscale condominiums.