Print Size: 8 1/2" x 11" (Frame Size: 16" x 20") Architect: Walter W. Ahlschlager
With all the drama of Hugh Ferriss’ renderings of stepped skyscrapers in “Metropolis of Tomorrow,” architect Walter W. Ahlschlager presented his visionary scheme for the Apparel Mart in Chicago. The (unbuilt) 75-story tower, 845 feet high, would have loomed 15 stories above New York’s Woolworth Building, then the tallest in the world. It would have occupied two city blocks and contained 4,650,000 square feet of space, housing an apparel mart and exhibition space on floors 1-23, then 22 floors of offices for the fashion industry, and above that, a 1,000-room hotel with a rooftop swimming pool. Also included were auditoriums, restaurants, shops, prominent social clubs, a 1,200-car garage, and a new railroad terminal, the whole to be built over the open rail yards of the Illinois Central Railroad. Ahlschlager drew on his experience as architect of New York’s cathedral of cinema, he Roxy Theater, to spotlight his luminous building against a radiant charcoal sky. The spectacular staging celebrates one of the earliest commercial buildings conceived on air rights. Unfortunately, negotiations continued for a year after the scheme’s public presentation in 1928, by which time the stock market had collapsed. The project was never executed.
