Why you should experience Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown in Chicago, Illinois.
Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown is an art-minded hotel where River North's creative energy, hospitality reinvention, contemporary cultural character and long tradition of repurposing downtown addresses converge inside a building that has moved through several distinct hotel eras.
Set along East Ontario Street near North Rush Street and just steps from The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, the property traces its hospitality lineage to the Croydon Hotel, a 1927 building remembered as a gathering place for vaudeville performers before later becoming The James Chicago. Deborah Berke Partners and Chicago-based GREC Architects subsequently reworked the structure for 21c Museum Hotels, introducing a double-height lobby, a new staircase and more than 10,000 square feet devoted to contemporary art while preserving the building as an operating hotel. The February 2020 opening became Deborah Berke Partners' ninth project for 21c, extending a design relationship that began with the company's original Louisville property in 2006 and bringing the museum-hotel concept into Chicago. The result is a property where the Croydon, The James, Deborah Berke Partners and 21c form successive layers of River North's hospitality history before the address emerged under its current Hotel 55 identity.
What you should know about Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown.
Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown is best known for inheriting one of Chicago hospitality's most ambitious contemporary-art programs from 21c Museum Hotel Chicago, whose opening exhibition This We Believe assembled more than 110 paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos by 57 artists from 28 countries under Museum Director and Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. The museum operated across more than 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, while commissioned installations and rotating exhibitions extended contemporary art beyond conventional galleries into the hotel's circulation and event spaces. Chicago artist Nick Cave and designer Bob Faust developed Wallworks from nine patterns derived from detailed photographs of Cave's Soundsuits and Tondos, combining synthetic hair, sequined fabric, buttons, wire and vintage toile into 16 bespoke elevator-lobby installations spanning floors two through 17. Historic Hotels of America subsequently selected 21c Chicago among its 2021 hotels recognized for significant art collections, placing Cave, Faust, Stites and an international roster of 57 artists within the cultural history inherited by the present property.
Lure Fishbar carries another strand of the address forward through Mercer Street Hospitality founder John McDonald, whose original Lure opened in New York's SoHo in 2004 before the Chicago restaurant joined the former 21c property. The concept's culinary lineage includes longtime Executive Chef Preston Clark, son of pioneering chef Patrick Clark, whose career included Tavern on the Green and Washington's Hay-Adams Hotel before becoming the first Black chef to receive a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic in 1994. Hotel 55 continues operating Lure Fishbar at 616 North Rush Street as its principal restaurant, preserving the seafood-focused concept through the building's transition from 21c and linking the current hotel with McDonald's two-decade restaurant enterprise. Together, John McDonald, Preston Clark, Patrick Clark and the continuing Lure Fishbar connect Hotel 55's newest character with a culinary lineage whose roots extend through New York restaurant culture and one of the consequential Black chefs in twentieth-century American fine dining.
How to fold Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown into your trip.
Hotel 55 Chicago Downtown works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing private collecting, experimental art and architectural patronage through River North.
Begin at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where First National Bank of Chicago founder Samuel Mayo Nickerson commissioned Burling & Whitehouse for his 24,000-square-foot residence, completed in 1883 for $450,000 with interiors involving R. W. Bates & Co., William August Fiedler and George A. Schastey & Co. Continue to Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, founded in 1967 under Jan van der Marck before German architect Josef Paul Kleihues won the commission for its present building, his first American project, which opened in 1996 after a $45 million construction program and welcomed more than 25,000 people during its 24-hour public preview. Conclude at The Arts Club of Chicago, founded in 1916 and shaped by generations of patrons who brought figures including Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein and John Cage into Chicago's cultural orbit before Rue Winterbotham Shaw commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the institution's celebrated 1951 interiors. The progression moves from Nickerson's Gilded Age collecting through van der Marck and Kleihues's experimental institution into Shaw and Mies's modernist patronage, creating a cultural sequence particularly suited to a hotel address whose own history became intertwined with contemporary art.
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