Will Price's Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Terminal, 1918

While browsing through the Cushman Photograph Collection, I stumbled across a  random photo of the Chicago skyline from the 1940s.  It wasn’t a typical postcard view of the city.  Rather, the photo was taken from the railroad yards located southwest of the Loop, somewhere in the vicinity of Polk and Canal Streets.  In the background, the photographer captured several 1930s office towers rising above the LaSalle Street canyon.  Clearly visible (from left to right) are:

• Foreman State National Bank Building (1930)
• One North LaSalle Building (1930)
• Roanoke Tower (1925)
• The Field Building (1934)
• Chicago Board of Trade (1930)

(c) Cushman Photograph Collection, University of Indiana

This parade of Deco skyscrapers leads the viewer’s eye to the focal point of the photo: a huge brick structure with an impressive clock tower built over top of a series of arched bays opening onto the railroad tracks.  This intriguing building was, at first, a mystery to me—despite its size and prominence, I was unfamiliar with it. I’ve driven down Canal Street (between Roosevelt and Union Station) dozens of times, but couldn’t remember seeing this structure.

In the photo the building’s signage clearly reads “Western Warehousing Co.”  After some Internet searching, I found my first clue in a digitized copy of the Press Club of Chicago's Official Reference Book of 1922.  The building was identified as the “Western Warehousing Company Plant, Polk Street Terminal, Pennsylvania System.”  The publication describes the building as:

…the immense plant of the Western Warehousing Company at the Pennsylvania Railroad's Polk street freight terminal. Half a million square feet of floor space is available here for merchants and manufacturers maintaining stocks in Chicago… Some idea of its size may be gained when one realizes that beneath the structure there is track space for 360 cars, 18 tracks of 20 cars each…The warehouse and freight station are served by thirty-six electric elevators, varying in capacity from 5 to 10 tons.

Further digging revealed that the structure housing the Western Warehousing Company—commonly known as the Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Terminal—was designed by the Philadelphia firm of Price & McLanahan and constructed between 1915 and 1918.  This massive structure was “Part 1” in the master plan to consolidate the facilities of several railroad companies to allow for the eventual construction of Chicago’s Union Station (1925).

Carl Condit called the Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Terminal “an overlooked masterpiece of Chicago architecture.”  It was designed by engineers from the Pennsylvania Railroad, responsible for the planning and engineering of the terminal, and William L. Price (principal architect of Price & McLanahan) responsible for its unique design.  In the early 1970s, Condit wrote that “the excellence of their achievement is still apparent, even after the increasingly careless maintenance and the atmospheric corrosion of more than half a century.”  Unfortunately, the “excellence of their achievement” was only to a last a few years longer—according to George E. Thomas in his book William L. Price: Arts & Crafts to Modern Design, the terminal was “demolished in the 1970s.”  This explains why I had never seen the building for myself.

Canal Street facade of Penn RR Freight Terminal (from Condit)
Somewhat better photos are accessible on the Art Institute of Chicago website.

Sprawling over a large area, the terminal was bounded by Polk Street on the north, Taylor Street on the south, the Chicago River on the east, and Canal Street on the west. Despite its enormous size, the terminal reads (in photos) as a collection of smaller buildings instead of one gargantuan structure. Price subdivided the mass of the terminal to create the illusion of several smaller warehouses linked together, their varying facades alternately projecting and receding. The overall design was unified by a long platform of open bays on which the warehouses sat (and where the trains entered beneath the building) and the use of red brick and Price’s distinctive detailing throughout.

Although the terminal was not symmetrical, the structure was composed of many localized symmetries with each “building” featuring vertical lines despite the overall horizontal emphasis of the structure.  Price masterfully employed his millions of red bricks to create varied compositions featuring arches, buttresses, set backs, chamfered edges, and restrained ornamentation.  The design is curvilinear and organic and takes pains not to emulate historic styles—a stark contrast to the neoclassical Union Station.

Vintage photo of Penn RR Freight Terminal
Polk Street facade (facing north) and clock tower

In fact, Price’s terminal defies stylistic categorization. It lies somewhere between late Art Nouveau and what some might call “proto-Deco.”  Its precedents range from Price’s Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City (1906) to Eliel Saarinen’s early designs for the Helsinki Central Station (1909).  But Price’s terminal stands apart from these as something different.

The clock tower was arguably the terminal’s most interesting feature.  Its stepped-back silhouette foreshadowed the design of Chicago’s office towers of the late 1920s and early 1930s.  In the Cushman photo, the formal similarities between the clock tower and the Board of Trade building are evident: classical proportions, vertical lines and emphasis, and tapered massing culminating in a pyramidal roof.

Silhouetted tower of the Penn RR Freight Terminal
Photo courtesy Library of Congress (LOC_8d24881r_JackDelano)

Unfortunately, Price didn’t live long enough to see the Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Terminal completed.  He died prematurely in 1916 at the age of 55. Price’s biographer, George E. Thomas, speculates that had Price lived to complete more works, he would have rivaled his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright in influence in American architecture. Regardless, Price’s terminal kicked-off a new era in Chicago architecture and design, an era in which multiple ideas of “the modern” competed with one another.

Sources for this post include:

Chicago 1910-1929: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology

by Carl W. Condit (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1973)

William L. Price: Arts & Crafts to Modern Design

by George E. Thomas (Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 2000)

Official Reference Book (Press Club of Chicago: Chicago, 1922)