Why you should experience Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.
Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago is a spirited Loop hotel where Rapp & Rapp's theatrical architecture, Chicago's skyscraper history and a new sports-centered hospitality character converge inside the former Old Dearborn Bank Building.
Set along North Wabash Avenue near East Lake Street and just steps from The Chicago Theatre, the hotel occupies a 1928 skyscraper designed by Cornelius W. Rapp and George L. Rapp, the brothers whose movie palaces helped define American entertainment architecture during the interwar years. The Old Dearborn Bank Building became one of only two Rapp & Rapp commissions designed exclusively for offices, combining the disciplined vertical form of a Chicago commercial tower with fantastical terra-cotta figures drawn from medieval and mythological imagery more characteristic of the firm's theaters. Dearborn Bank entered the building shortly before the Great Depression destabilized Chicago banking, while the tower survived successive commercial uses before Chicago designated it for architectural protection on June 4, 2003. The result is a hotel where Rapp & Rapp's rare experiment in office architecture connects the financial exuberance of 1928 with nearly a century of reinvention at one of the Loop's most visually distinctive addresses.
What you should know about Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago.
Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago is best known for beginning its current chapter after the former Virgin Hotels Chicago sold for $77.4 million in June 2025, setting in motion Travel + Leisure Co.'s plan to create an 250-unit Sports Illustrated Resorts property within the historic tower. Accelerated Assets acquired the building before a Travel + Leisure affiliate began purchasing the property in phases, while the Sports Illustrated Resorts concept placed Chicago within a hospitality platform developed around the magazine brand through a licensing relationship with ABG-SI LLC. The property entered its “Preseason Era” by December 2025 and remained operational through renovations designed to culminate in the full resort concept during late 2026, turning the transition itself into an unusually visible chapter of the building's hospitality history. Travel + Leisure's 250-unit plan, the $77.4 million transaction, ABG-SI licensing relationship and phased conversion together make the Chicago property a significant urban expression of Sports Illustrated Resorts.
The current reinvention follows an equally consequential hospitality chapter that began when Virgin Hotels selected the Old Dearborn Bank Building for the January 15, 2015 debut of Richard Branson's hotel brand, making Chicago the first operating Virgin Hotels property anywhere in the world. Booth Hansen directed the architectural conversion while Rockwell Group's Madrid office shaped major interiors around surviving bank-era fabric, including the original double-height banking hall, coffered plaster ceiling, marble staircase, brass elevator doors and a 1920s oak cigar counter repurposed as the reception desk. The 250-room opening introduced 40 one-bedroom suites and two penthouse suites while placing Virgin's first hotel inside a building created by architects better known for The Chicago Theatre and Uptown Theatre, producing an unusual collision between Rapp & Rapp's 1920s theatrical imagination and Branson's twenty-first-century hospitality expansion. Sports Illustrated Resorts now inherits that layered chronology, Old Dearborn Bank, Rapp & Rapp, Booth Hansen, Rockwell Group, Richard Branson and Travel + Leisure Co., giving the current conversion a factual narrative extending far beyond its newest brand identity.
How to fold Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago into your trip.
Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing how architecture turned entertainment, civic culture and corporate ambition into three radically different expressions of the Loop's interwar identity.
Begin at The Chicago Theatre, where Cornelius and George Rapp completed the $4 million flagship for Barney and Abe Balaban and Sam and Morris Katz in 1921, opening the 3,880-seat movie palace on October 26 with Norma Talmadge in The Sign on the Door, a 50-piece orchestra and Jesse Crawford performing on the Wurlitzer organ. Continue to Chicago Cultural Center, where Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge completed Chicago's first permanent central public library in 1897 and Preston Bradley Hall later became inseparable from its 38-foot Tiffany glass dome, an immense composition containing 30,000 pieces of glass across more than 1,000 square feet before its 2008 restoration. Conclude at Carbide and Carbon Building, where Daniel Burnham's sons Daniel Jr. and Hubert Burnham completed the 37-story headquarters in 1929 for Union Carbide and Carbon Company, wrapping the tower in polished black granite, dark green and gold terra cotta, bronze and genuine 24-karat gold leaf before the market crash eliminated plans for a matching sister tower. The progression moves from Rapp & Rapp's movie-palace performance through Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge's civic craftsmanship into the Burnham brothers' corporate Art Deco expression, revealing the architectural world surrounding Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago during the decades that produced its own 1928 tower.
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