Login
login / signup
The world’s largest Tiffany stained-glass dome wasn’t built for a cathedral, museum, or mansion. It was built for a public library. Chicago opened its central library in 1897 as a marble palace where community and knowledge were available to all Chicagoans.
Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge (today Shepley Bulfinch) was the architectural firm tasked with constructing the Chicago Public Library. Their team of architects had built the other cornerstones of Chicago’s artistic and intellectual life, including the Art Institute of Chicago across Michigan Avenue and the Newberry Library a few blocks uptown. The architects’ goal was not to create a warehouse for books, but to give the young and ambitious city a grand public venue for learning and civic life. They chose a neoclassical style for the exterior with powerful Greek columns and Roman arches built from Indiana limestone.
The interior of the library was where the Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge architects truly made their mark. Grand staircases, polished marble, and vivid mosaics adorned reading rooms, art galleries, and reception halls. The Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall was constructed on the second floor to honor Union soldiers and served as a meeting place for Union veterans for decades. The room displayed Civil War artifacts and its walls preserve a chronological list of the battles fought by its members.
The Chicago Public Library already had books waiting to go to its shelves. Two decades earlier, when the city was turned to ashes by the Great Chicago Fire, Queen Victoria and Great Britain sent 8,000 books to the city of Chicago to replenish what was lost in the fire. The books, including one personally signed by the Queen, had sat in a temporary library in an iron tank for over twenty years. Now, they had a home.
By the 1960s, the Chicago Public Library’s grandeur was fading. Grime had dulled the Tiffany dome and the collection was ballooning beyond the building’s capacity. The library, located in the core of downtown, made many question if old buildings had a place in Chicago. This changed when Elanor Daley, the wife of the mayor, spoke on behalf of a committee assigned to determine the fate of the library: “I am for restoring and keeping all the beautiful buildings.”
The building has since seen large investments in restoration. All 30,000 pieces of the Tiffany Dome were cleaned and restored, revealing the dome’s original jewel-like blues, greens, and golds hidden for decades behind city soot. In 1991, the books migrated across the Loop to the Harold Wilson Library and the building began a new chapter as the Chicago Cultural Center. Today, the CCC hosts music, art galleries, lectures, and receptions.
When it was constructed, the building’s Gilded Age opulence and neoclassical beauty earned it the nickname “The People’s Palace.” More than 125 years later, the marble halls, stained-glass domes, and restored mosaics still welcome visitors free of charge into a palace that never belonged to kings, but to the people of Chicago.
