Former Chicago Daily News building could be in line for landmark status

The former Chicago Daily News building, an Art Deco knockout that has eluded landmark status for decades, will be recommended Thursday for the designation — opening the door for public subsidies to help fund a $70 million renovation of the structure.

The Commission on Chicago Landmarks will hear a request from the Historic Preservation Division of the city's Department of Planning and Development to grant a preliminary designation for the 26-story building, known in recent years as 2 N. Riverside Plaza.

If approved, the building's most significant features — including its exteriors, riverfront plaza, 200-foot-long second-floor concourse that leads to the Ogilvie Transportation Center pedestrian bridge, and the complex's dazzling Jazz Age first- and second-floor lobby spaces — would be protected.

The Department of Planning wouldn't comment on the designation.

The building's new owners, 2 N. Riverside Venture, who acquired the building in June 2025, didn't return a call seeking comment. A major investor in the ownership group is Blue Star Properties, a company with holdings that include The Salt Shed music venue at 1357 N. Elston Ave.

The building is among 300 of the city's 17,000 structures built before 1940 that carry a top-rated "red" designation in the Chicago Historic Resources Survey.

The designation puts the Daily News building in the same architectural company as Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Hyde Park and the champagne bottle-like Carbide & Carbon Building at 230 S. Michigan Ave.

"It's long overdue," architect Thomas Leslie, author of "Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934," said of the city's move to seek landmark status for the building. "I was actually surprised that it wasn't already landmarked. It's one of these really important buildings of the late '20s, early 1930s — the kind of Modern movement in Chicago."

Built in 1929 with seemingly little expense spared, the Chicago Daily News building looked chiseled and forward-looking compared to the neo-Gothic then-headquarters of the Chicago Tribune, which was built in 1925.

The design was also an architectural expression of the might and influence of the old Chicago Daily News, an important afternoon newspaper with correspondents around the globe.

It was the first major U.S. structure built on railroad air rights.

Architects Holabird & Root turned the best and broadest of the slablike block-long building away from Madison and Washington streets and toward the south branch of the Chicago River, making it among the city's first buildings designed to embrace the then-murky and occasionally foul waterway.

Then, in a masterstroke, the architects designed a wide public riverside plaza as a work of art. An assortment of relief elements on the building's facade enliven the space, including tributes to the early written word and luminaries of the publishing industry.

"One of my favorite ways to come into the city is to come from the Ogilvie center, over the bridge, through the [Daily News building] corridor and out onto the plaza," Leslie said. "It gives you that great perspective up and down the river. The building was visionary in that sense of providing an urban space, but also understanding that the river was going to become a really important civic element."

If the city's landmarks commission grants a preliminary designation for the Daily News building on Thursday, the panel will then vote to decide if the structure's planned rehab is eligible for a property tax assessment reclassification that could pour millions into the project.

The so-called Class L designation has been used to assist in the redevelopment of landmark commercial properties in Cook County.

The Daily News' planned rehab is expected to cover the building's commercial places, but details beyond that remain sketchy until Thursday's commission meeting.

The work, if wide enough in scope, is just the thing the building has needed for years. While its interiors look good, the building's patchy and dingy-in-places facade needs help.

The city didn't seek landmark status for the Daily News building's longtime ownership under the late powerful developer Sam Zell, a choice that placed the building at risk. Zell wanted to raze the property in 2000 and replace it with a new tower, but then-Mayor Richard M. Daley halted the plan.

In 2008, Zell wanted to destroy the Daily News plaza and squeeze in a new skyscraper between the river and the existing building. Luckily, the recession killed that idea.

But now under new owners, perhaps the Daily News building can shine once more.