Promontory Apartments - Chicago, IL - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

The building is named after Promontory Point, a peninsula across Lake Shore Drive at the southern end of Burnham Park.

Light brown brick and concrete.

Excerpted from the building's history site:
"In 1946, Herbert Greenwald (1915-1959) returned to Chicago from military service during World War II, and decided to embark on a new career. Prior to the war he had been an educator, and a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, but now his interests turned to real estate development. No new high-rise residential buildings had been built in Chicago since the onset of the Great Depression, and he reasoned that there was a pent-up demand for them waiting to be met.

He chose the name Promontory Apartments for this first project, taking the name from nearby Promontory Point in Burnham Park. Promontory Point had been constructed as a landfill, extending the Lake Michigan shoreline outward some 400 feet, during the 1920’s as a part of Burnham Park, which extends along the lakefront from 12th to 56th Streets. In 1934-35, Burnham Park was planted by the landscape architect Alfred Caldwell in the English Romantic Landscape tradition of Brown, Repton, Olmsted and Jensen. During the 1920’s and 30’s, the Hyde Park lakefront and its beaches had been developed as a summer tourist destination, and a number of large tourist hotels had been built there, among the apartment towers. But during the war, the tourist industry had declined, and Greenwald had opted for a cooperatively-owned residential building.

Greenwald sought a leading architect for the project. FL Wright proved to be too expensive. Then, Greenwald wrote to the German-American architect Walter Gropius. He responded that his office in Boston was a long distance from Chicago, and went on to say, “Why should you come to me, when ‘the master of us all’, Mies van der Rohe, is in Chicago?”

Although Mies had never built a high-rise building, he made a favorable impression on Greenwald at their first meeting.

The construction of the Promontory proceeded rapidly, and was completed in the Spring of 1949. Because of the excellent site overlooking Lake Michigan, and the attractive qualities of Mies’s design, all the apartment units were rapidly sold, and the building was fully occupied shortly after it was finished.

In 1995, a committee of three tenant-owners, with the support of the building’s trustees, began to prepare a nomination to place the Promontory Apartments on the National Register of Historic Places, based on four factors: first, it was the work of an acknowledged master of world architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; second, it possessed high artistic value as evidenced by the opinions of critics; third, it was the first realization of two important design themes in Mies’s subsequent work, his expression of skeleton structure as an architectural element and his use of tripartite horizontal division in high-rise buildings; and fourth, it was the first International Style high-rise apartment building in the nation. The nomination was approved, and the building was entered on the National Register in the Fall of 1996."

Street address: 5530--5532 South Shore Dr., Chicago, IL USA 60637 County / Borough / Parish: Cook County Year listed: 1996 Historic (Areas of) Significance: Architecture/Engineering Periods of significance: 1925-1949 Historic function: Domestic Current function: Domestic Privately owned?: yes Primary Web Site: [Web Link] Secondary Website 1: [Web Link] Season start / Season finish: Not listed Hours of operation: Not listed Secondary Website 2: Not listed National Historic Landmark Link: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   04/06/2012 beerbatterbilly visited it