The Auditorium Building: Adler & Sullivan's Theater, Hotel and Office Tower

By Solomon Rokowsky

October 27, 2026

The Auditorium Building from Michigan Avenue. Photo: Warren LeMay. Source. CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized.

The Auditorium Building was built on a bet that a city could afford to be generous. It put an opera house, a hotel and a block of offices under one roof, and the plan was that the rent from the hotel and offices would keep ticket prices low. Adler & Sullivan designed it, and when it was completed in 1889 the National Park Service calls it the tallest and most expensive building in Chicago.

The building stands at 430 South Michigan Avenue, with the theater entrance at 50 East Ida B. Wells Drive. It now holds Roosevelt University and the Auditorium Theatre. Its story includes a Republican convention, a young Frank Lloyd Wright, a building that nearly went dark for good, and a rescue led by a woman named Beatrice Spachner.

Ferdinand Peck's idea

The Auditorium Theatre's own history pages open with the years after the Great Chicago Fire. The city had burned in 1871 and again in 1874, and labor unrest led to the Haymarket events of May 1886. Chicago's first opera house had been lost to fire. The theater's account says that after the city's Grand Opera Festival in 1885, businessman and arts patron Ferdinand Peck began planning a permanent home for the arts.

The Auditorium Theatre writes that Peck imagined a theater that would serve everyone and promote unity across class and culture. The Chicago Architecture Center agrees that the goal was to make opera and the arts accessible to people at every income level. Peck persuaded other wealthy Chicagoans, including Marshall Field, Edson Keith and George Pullman, to join the Chicago Auditorium Association. On December 22, 1886, the Association hired Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, with whom Peck had worked on the 1885 festival. Excavation began on January 28, 1887.

The plan included a theater of about 4,200 seats surrounded by more than 130 offices, a first-class hotel of 400 rooms, a bar and restaurants, according to the theater's history. The Architecture Center calls the mixed-use idea fairly new at the time, and says Peck planned for hotel and office profits to hold ticket prices down.

Cable trains on Wabash Avenue in front of the Auditorium Building, 1892. Photo: Unknown photographer. Source. Public domain. Resized.

From pointed roofs to a stone mass

The first designs looked quite different from what was built. Chapter 4 of the Auditorium Theatre's history describes an earliest rendering by Paul C. Lautrup, prepared by September 1886, with pointed roofs and ornate exterior. At a board meeting on December 11, 1886, a revised design was presented. The board decided the first version "was too frivolous or ornate" and "should be more of a monumental character."

The revised exterior was closer to the finished building, but it still had a pyramid-like crown on the tower. A comment on the rendering said the building seemed "as if intended to be carried down the centuries like an Egyptian pyramid." The pyramid was dropped after advice from Professor William Ware, the founder of Columbia University's school of architecture, who had also been Sullivan's teacher. The theater's history says Ware's opinion decided the final form. After the building was done, Adler described the outside as "dignified, impressive, simple and straightforward."

The result is Richardsonian Romanesque in style, with big stone walls and semicircular arches. The Architecture Center says Sullivan was strongly influenced by H. H. Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store and used rusticated stone in one color. The building had separate entrances for the theater, the offices and the hotel.

Adler's engineering

Dankmar Adler handled the hard engineering. The Architecture Center says he designed a foundation substantial enough for a 16-story tower. After the foundation was in place, Peck asked for two more floors, and the architects agreed. The extra weight caused excessive settlement under the tower, which the Center says proved Adler's original calculations right. The National Park Service counts the tower at seventeen stories, so the exact count depends on how the floors are counted. A banquet hall was also added late, and Adler carried its load on giant iron trusses above the theater's vaulted roof.

The city landmark report says the settlement was about 18 inches, while Wikipedia says 29, so treat the figure as uncertain. Whichever is right, the Architecture Center calls the Auditorium the largest, tallest, priciest and heaviest building of its time.

The auditorium interior from the balcony, about 1890. Photo: J. W. Taylor. Source. Public domain. Resized.

The hall

The theater is the reason for all this. The Architecture Center says Adler's acoustical design, created before acoustics could be calculated scientifically, is a masterpiece of sound. The Auditorium Theatre repeats the claim of near-perfect acoustics, and quotes Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked there as a draftsman, calling it "the greatest room for music and opera in the world - bar none."

Visitors enter through a low, compressed passage and then step into a six-story room with gilded arches and a glittering ceiling, a contrast the Architecture Center says was planned. The theater's history describes the theater's seating as meant to be less divided by class. Sources differ on the details. The Architecture Center says box seats were moved to the sides, with a large main floor and generous balconies, while the theater's chapter 1 says the plans originally had no boxes and they were added before the opening after requests.

The room could also change size. The National Park Service says it held 4,200 seats but could expand to 7,000 or shrink to 3,000. The theater lists a reducing curtain, a temporary floor, movable ceiling panels and hydraulic lifts among the features that let it change size, shape and purpose. The Architecture Center notes 3,500 bare carbon filament light bulbs, a technology first shown publicly in 1879. The hall's mosaic floors, stencils and gold-leaf arches were later restored, and the theater says it has 24-karat gold-leafed ceiling arches and hundreds of Sullivan's stencil patterns.

Arches in the Auditorium Theatre. Photo: bradhoc. Source. CC BY 2.0. Resized.

A drafting room for Wright

The offices in the tower housed Adler & Sullivan's own practice, and the National Park Service says Sullivan's office was there for twenty years. The theater's page says Frank Lloyd Wright was hired as a young draftsman by the firm in 1888, and the Architecture Center says that while working on the project he learned a great deal from Sullivan about organic ornament.

The building's reputation drew speakers. Theodore Roosevelt was nominated for president by the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party at the Auditorium Theatre in 1912, and the theater's history quotes his "Armageddon" speech. In June 1916 the Republican National Convention was held in Chicago, and the National Park Service says suffrage groups used the Auditorium Building for committee meetings and speakers. The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage held a luncheon there at which leaders proposed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, according to the theater's history.

When the plan failed

Peck's financial plan did not hold. The Architecture Center says the hotel and offices could not support the theater. In the 1940s the City of Chicago took over the building and used it as a World War II officers' center. By 1945 the space had deteriorated, with significant damage to Sullivan's plaster ornament. The Auditorium Theatre says the hall remained open through the Depression but closed completely in the 1940s, 1950s and most of the 1960s.

To prevent demolition, Roosevelt University acquired the building in 1947, according to the National Park Service. It lacked the money to restore the theater until 1963, when an Auditorium Theatre Council was formed to raise funds. The theater credits Mrs. Beatrice T. Spachner and a group of civic leaders. Architect Harry Weese directed the restoration, and the theater reopened in October 1967 with a performance by the New York City Ballet of George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Arched upper windows and stone detail on the Auditorium Building facade, 2009. Photo: Micael Camozzi. Source. Public domain (released by the author). Resized.

Landmark status

The Historic American Buildings Survey documented the building in August 1963. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1970, named a National Historic Landmark on May 15, 1975, and designated a Chicago Landmark on September 15, 1976, the National Park Service reports. The theater's own site lists decades of guests, from Theodore Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells and from Alvin Ailey to Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix.

The exact opening date differs between sources. The theater says December 9, 1889, the city landmark report says December 10, and the National Park Service says only that the building was completed in 1889, so this article says December 1889.

Seeing the building

The theater offers tours, and its box office is open Monday through Friday, noon to 6 p.m., with longer hours on performance days. Check the theater's schedule before you go. The Roosevelt University lobby is part of the same building, and the exterior is worth a walk on its own, since the stone has the same weight on Michigan Avenue and on Congress Parkway.

Who owns the Auditorium Building today?

Roosevelt University owns the Auditorium Building. It bought the building in 1947. The university's own page describes the building as part of its Chicago campus, and a 1981 preservation agreement describes the property as owned in fee simple by the university. An Illinois appellate court ruling, from a dispute over who controlled the theater, records that the trial court declared Roosevelt the sole and exclusive owner of the theater. The Auditorium Theatre, which operates the hall as the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University, is a separate nonprofit operator, not the owner. Read October 27, 2026.

Where can you eat or drink at the Auditorium Building?

Acanto Restaurant & Wine Bar is at 18 S. Michigan Avenue, along Chicago's cultural mile near the building, phone 312-578-0763. Its website lists Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. This differs from what the theater's restaurant page says, so use Acanto's own site. These hours were read on October 27, 2026; confirm before visiting. A cafe operated by Roosevelt University is in the lobby, but its hours could not be verified.