Belmont-Sheffield Trust and Savings Bank Building
- Style
- Art Deco
- City
- Chicago, IL
- Collection
- chicago deco
Built in 1928 at 1001 W. Belmont Avenue, this six-story building mixed banking, offices, and lodging under one roof, wrapped in a U-shape around a two-story light court. It anchored a Lincoln Park corner as the Belmont-Sheffield Trust and Savings Bank until the bank failed in the Depression, then cycled through decades of vacancy and civic use before reinventing itself as apartments.
the building
Skylit atrium plan. The building was built in a U-shape wrapped around a two-story central atrium topped with a glass roof, which let daylight reach the ground-floor bank lobby below. That original glass atrium has since been roofed over, closing off the light well.
Bank, offices, and hotel stacked. The program layered three uses: the Belmont-Sheffield Trust and Savings Bank occupied the first floor and part of the second, general offices filled the rest of the second and third floors, and the Montfield Hotel, with its own Sheffield Avenue address, took floors four through six.
the style
The building mixes Neoclassical and Art Deco elements, a combination typical of 1920s commercial buildings that paired classical order with the newer decorative vocabulary arriving just before the Depression halted most construction of its kind.
More on Art Decosignificance
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, the same year a developer used a federal loan to convert the long-vacant Montfield Hotel floors into 54 apartments while keeping ground-floor stores, giving the building a second life.
nearby
- 42nd Presinct / Town Hall Police Station
- Wrigley Field
- Lake View Presbyterian Church
- Temple Sholom
- Brewster Apartments
- Building at 320 West Oakdale Avenue