Scrounging around for unconventional illustrations allows me to call eBay shopping “research” instead of just “procrastination,” but every so often it pays off. This week’s haul includes a set of Brownie photographs that were taken from the roof of the Tribune Tower (judging from the position of the Wrigley Building, lower left). You’re looking at the Marina City site in the foreground and the still-new Wacker Drive across the River–the only tall building on it is Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White’s Builders Building, which was just finished in 1927. The warehouses and factories that lined the riverfront are still mostly intact…not exactly the high-rent district it would become.

Our photographer has just turned to the left…Herbert Hugh Riddle’s Mather Tower–a building so slender it needed tension foundations to hold it down in a windstorm–is being finished on the right and if you look closely you can see that GAPW’s Pittsfield Building is up and nearly all clad, but missing interior walls. That was Al Shaw’s first major project and you can see that he brought a distinct style to the firm that had just done the solidly classical Builders the year before. Those two being under construction puts a pretty firm date on these–the Pittsfield opened in February, 1928, so these must have been taken sometime in Fall, 1927. Note the Peristyle at the head of Grant Park.

And finally, swinging around to look almost due west. The Merchandise Mart hasn’t been started and you can see the “twin tower” Butler Warehouses and the Cold Storage building on the opposite side of the North and South Branches of the River–now all converted into residential uses. Over to the right is the 1892 Criminal Courts Building by Otto Matz, and the tower of George Nimmons Reid Murdoch Building (1913) is just peaking up on the main branch’s north bank. Other than those, there’s not a whole lot along Hubbard and Kinzie that’s still there.

Useful? Well, as a baseline for the development along the Main Branch, for sure, but mostly just a rare find of some comprehensive views of the city at the peak of its 1920s boom. Thirty years later in 1957 the view wouldn’t have changed much–but another thirty years from that and our anonymous photographer wouldn’t have recognized much…