Stained Glass – Elephant and Castle Pub, MDA Building, 185 North Wabash Avenue at Lake Street, Chicago, Illinois, United States

nobody@ipernity.com (Jonathan Cohen) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 17:00:16 +0000

Chicago’s "MDA Building" is one of those downtown buildings few have heard of but that has its own interesting history. Designed by Daniel Burnham, Jr. and completed in 1927, it’s 24 floors, 290-feet high. Originally known as the Medical and Dental Arts Building, it was home to both the Chicago Dental Society and the Chicago Medical Society, as well as a larger roster of doctors and dentists. In October of 1939, it was the site of the first meeting of the Chicago chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their 1940 New Year’s Eve party was noted as featuring a "large assortment of sobered up piano players." The Chicago Literary Club, founded in 1874, moved to the 22nd floor as a cheaper alternative to their previous lodgings in the Fine Arts Building, and the same floor was the site of 10 cent lectures sponsored by the Marxist publication The New Masses in the 1930’s. In 1929, the Tribune reported that Mrs. Benjamin Baskin gave birth to a baby boy in one of the elevators. Hopefully, the building’s large population of doctors included least one obstetrician.

Over time, the structure evolved into a more traditional office building, and was known for the rather ugly paint job on its top floor facades. In 2003, the building, renamed MDA City Apartments, underwent a $45 million upgrade by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture that saw the offices converted to 190 luxury rental units, with an outlet of the Elephant and Castle restaurant chain on the first floor of the limestone clad base, which also includes an Artisan Pastoral Cheese Shop.

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Stained Glass – Elephant and Castle Pub, MDA Building, 185 North Wabash Avenue at Lake Street, Chicago, Illinois, United States