Inside the 1911 cold storage building we call home

A warehouse built to stay cold

Our building went up in 1911 as a cold storage warehouse for the wholesale market that gave Fulton Market its name. Its walls are nearly two feet thick, lined with cork for insulation, and the original floors were designed to hold railcar loads of butter, eggs and meat packed in ice.

For decades the building was mostly windowless. Goods came in through loading docks on the south side and left by truck through the courtyard. Ice was harvested and later produced on site, and the water tower on the roof fed the refrigeration system.

Decline and a long wait

By the 1980s, refrigerated trucks and suburban distribution centers had made buildings like ours obsolete. The upper floors emptied first. For nearly thirty years the warehouse sat mostly vacant, used for storage and occasionally as a film location, while the neighborhood around it slowly changed.

When the restaurants and offices started arriving in the 2010s, many cold storage buildings nearby were torn down. Ours survived largely because it was too solid to demolish cheaply.

Cutting windows into a vault

The biggest job in the renovation was letting in light. The architects cut 412 new window openings into the brick, sized to match the handful of original factory windows on the lower floors. Each opening had to be reinforced with steel, and the cork insulation removed by hand.

Inside, we kept what we could. The timber joists, steel columns and many sections of original brick are still exposed in the lofts. The heavy doors of the old cold vault on the ground floor now open into our Cold Room meeting space, and you can still see the latch hardware.

• 412 new window openings, each reinforced with steel lintels.
• About 70 percent of the original brick walls left exposed inside.
• The rooftop water tower restored and lit at night as a neighborhood landmark.

Building for the next hundred years

Reusing a building is one of the most sustainable choices in construction, because it keeps the carbon already spent on bricks and steel in place. We added geothermal heating and cooling, rainwater collection for the courtyard plants and a green roof section on the terrace. The project earned LEED Gold certification in 2020.

The thick walls that once kept butter cold now keep lofts quiet and warm, which may be the best unintended benefit of all.

See it for yourself

Every Saturday at 9 am we run a free building walk for guests, starting in the lobby. It takes about 45 minutes and ends on the roof next to the water tower, with coffee. Ask the front desk to add your name to the list.

If you are a design or history group, our team can arrange a longer private tour with archive photos from the Chicago History Museum collection.