Why you should experience The LaSalle Chicago, Autograph Collection in Chicago, Illinois.
The LaSalle Chicago, Autograph Collection is a patrician financial-district hotel where the Loop's banking power, Daniel Burnham's architectural discipline and contemporary hospitality converge high above the street that became synonymous with Chicago capital.
Set along South LaSalle Street near West Adams Street and just steps from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the hotel occupies the upper five floors of the 21-story former Continental and Commercial National Bank Building, a Classical Revival skyscraper completed in 1914 from designs initiated by D. H. Burnham & Company and carried forward by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. Continental and Commercial National Bank ranked among the nation's largest banks when the building rose, while its eight-column, three-story Doric entrance and corresponding upper colonnade gave the immense financial institution an architectural style of permanence at 208 South LaSalle. Completion made the structure the most expensive building yet constructed in Chicago, placing its scale and cost within the extraordinary concentration of banking architecture that reshaped LaSalle Street during the early twentieth century. The result is a hotel embedded not simply within an old skyscraper but within the physical expression of Chicago finance at its most confident, where Burnham's final period and Graham, Anderson, Probst & White's continuation of his architectural practice remain legible more than a century later.
What you should know about The LaSalle Chicago.
The LaSalle Chicago, Autograph Collection is best known for opening in June 2022 after developer Michael Reschke and The Prime Group converted 158,000 square feet of former upper-floor commercial space into a 232-room hotel, inserting a new luxury property above the JW Marriott Chicago already occupying the lower portion of the same building. DiLeonardo International developed the interiors with Chipman Design Architecture, translating the address's financial pedigree through Calacatta marble, Egyptian rugs, dark woods, gold finishes, jewel tones and geometric detailing rather than reproducing its original banking rooms. The 1,684-square-foot Presidential Suite extends that residential interpretation through a private study, dining room, designer kitchen, butler pantry and 169-square-foot primary bathroom, while the broader room program places more than 230 accommodations within floors once devoted to commercial work. Michael Reschke's decision to create the hotel followed his identification of an underserved luxury market within the Financial District itself, turning The LaSalle into a hospitality counterpart to the offices, exchanges and banking institutions that had historically concentrated around its namesake street.
Roanoke Hospitality developed Grill on 21 as the hotel's culinary expression of the American grill, placing an exhibition kitchen at the center of a dining room built around prime steaks, hearth-roasted fish, raw-bar preparations and seasonal pasta while reconnecting the building's upper floors with LaSalle Street's longstanding culture of business dining. Executive Chef Carlos Deleon later advanced that character in collaboration with chef Rick Tramonto, the Chicago chef whose career included the nationally influential Tru, bringing another strand of the city's restaurant history into the hotel's contemporary dining program. The LaSalle's hourglass became the property's defining conceptual device, with separate five-minute and 30-minute timers in guestrooms translating the hotel's philosophy of rest and productivity into a physical object. Forbes Travel Guide subsequently placed The LaSalle within its independently inspected luxury collection, while the MICHELIN Guide added the 232-room property to its Chicago hotel selection, giving Reschke, DiLeonardo, Chipman Design Architecture, Roanoke Hospitality and Carlos Deleon distinct roles in a hotel whose contemporary character extends from finance into design, dining and the choreography of time.
How to fold The LaSalle Chicago into your trip.
The LaSalle Chicago, Autograph Collection works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the architects, financial institutions and commodity markets that made LaSalle Street one of the most concentrated expressions of American commercial ambition.
Begin at The Rookery, where Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root completed their 1888 office building around a luminous central court before Frank Lloyd Wright reworked the interior in 1905 with white marble, gilded ornament and geometric interventions, connecting three architects central to Chicago's emergence as the birthplace of the modern skyscraper. Continue to Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, completed in 1922 by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White after the institution grew from 41 employees at its 1914 opening to 1,200 by 1919, with 8,738 tons of structural steel supporting a headquarters whose 65-foot Corinthian colonnades and immense vault translated the authority of the young Federal Reserve System into architecture directly across LaSalle Street from The LaSalle. Conclude at Chicago Board of Trade Building, where Holabird & Root's 1930, 45-story Art Deco tower terminates the LaSalle Street canyon beneath John H. Storrs's 31-foot, 6,500-pound aluminum figure of Ceres, while Alvin Meyer's façade sculpture and the exchange's trading floors encode the grain and commodity markets that made Chicago internationally consequential. The progression moves from Burnham and Root's experiments in the early skyscraper through Graham, Anderson, Probst & White's architecture of central banking into Holabird & Root's vertical expression of commodity exchange, revealing The LaSalle Chicago, Autograph Collection as part of a financial corridor whose buildings narrate the development of modern Chicago capital.
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