Pontiac Building
Office skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois
The Pontiac Building is a historic high-rise building located at 542 S. Dearborn St. in the Printer's Row neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
01History
Built in 1891, the building is the oldest surviving work in downtown Chicago designed by the architecture firm Holabird & Roche. The fourteen-story building represents the Chicago school of architecture and is designed as a steel frame covered in brick. The building's Dearborn Street facade features three tiers of bay windows, while the facade on Federal Street features one tier of bay windows flanked by two tiers of flat windows; while the outer two tiers on both facades each span two bays, the middle tier spans only one. The bottoms of these tiers of windows, located at the second floor of the building, feature terra cotta soffits; the building's cornice is also terra cotta. The first two floors of the building feature limestone piers with decorative capitals. Due to the building's architectural significance, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 16, 1976.
As of August 2026, the building is being converted into 74 apartments.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Pontiac Building”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Pontiac Blg S Dearborn Chicago.JPG by Smallbones, Public domain
- Pontiac Building, Chicago, IL, USA, main entrance.jpg by Marc Rochkind, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Pontiac Building, Chicago, IL, USA, window detail.jpg by Marc Rochkind, CC BY-SA 4.0
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