Board of Trade

The Board organized in 1848 in rented rooms over a flour store on South Water Street and spent its first decades relocating for floor space — the file lists the itinerancy the way it lists everything, annually. In 1871 the Chicago Fire destroyed its Chamber of Commerce quarters, and the market did business for months in a ninety-foot-square wigwam while the city rebuilt.

The first permanent home came in 1885: William W. Boyington's Second Empire pile on this same site, with a mansard roof and a 300-foot tower that made it Chicago's tallest — until the tower itself was removed in 1895 for safety. By the 1920s the Boyington building was unsound, and demolition in 1929 cleared the lot for what now stands.

The current building wears its business on its skin: Alvin Meyer's sculptural program, grain carved into the grillwork, elevator doors, and facade — and flanking the thirteen-foot clock, two hooded figures: a Babylonian holding grain and a Native American holding corn, the exchange's whole history in two statues. Inside, the trading floor ran 113 by 163 feet with the wheat pit thirty-eight feet across; opening-day visitors were handed ripe heads of wheat.

The National Historic Landmark designation came in 1978, Chicago Landmark in 1977 — the building canonized while still working. The pits mostly went quiet in the electronic era; the CME Group sold the tower itself in 2012. The goddess, faceless, is unaffected by the migration of liquidity.

The timing deserves its own line in the record: the building opened in the spring of 1930, eight months into the worst economic collapse in American history, and kept its pits running through the whole Depression — a monument to commodity optimism completed in the exact season optimism failed. The lobby's light fixture, a single shaft of glass and metal, was billed at opening as the largest in the world; visitors on June 9 craned at it while the market below them priced survival.

The reports attached to the building are the financial-district catalogue: footsteps on empty trading floors after close, figures in the galleries above the silent pits, the presence traders describe when a building has held ninety years of fortunes being made and ruined in the same rooms. Nothing in the file is verified; the volume of hope and ruin documented is.

The register closes with the only apparition it can certify: a faceless goddess installed on the assumption of permanent invisibility, now visible from a thousand photographs a day — and still looking down, featureless, on whatever the market did today.