LaSalle Street at Jackson Boulevard
Visitors’ Center open Monday through Friday from 8am to 2pm
free admission 

The Chicago Board of Trade rears up at the end of LaSalle Street like the prow of a financial Titanic. This one seems to really be unsinkable. Designed in 1928 by architects Holabird and Root, the limestone facade is an elegant Art Deco landmark, topped by artist John Storr’s silvery statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain. She holds a sheaf of wheat in one hand, and a bag of corn in the other. It’s perfectly natural to mistake the latter for a sack of money, given the context in which she appears.

An addition to the original building was designed by local legend Helmut Jahn, whose controversial style defined a decade of exuberant postmodern architectural experiments. Completed in 1982, the addition works well as a modern companion piece. Echoing the Deco lines of the original, Jahn tied the buildings together with color, massing, and interior detail. In respectful recognition of the building’s history, a 1930 mural of Ceres designed and executed by Chicago artist John Warner Norton for the trading floor was reinstalled in the 12th floor atrium of Jahn’s annex.

To see the new Chicago Board of Trade in action, make your way up to the visitors’ gallery on the 5th floor. With its banks of steeply raked seats, the trading floor looks like a mercantile UN. An acute visual angle from the visitors’ gallery lends an otherworldly quality to the proceedings; voices float up from the floor as if from a great distance. The baroque stratification of markets in this institution evokes imperial bureaucracies, too: federal funds, bonds, bond options, municipal bonds, ten-, two-, and five-year notes and options, Dow options, gold and silver, are all traded here in site-specific markets.

You know you’re in the modern world, however, as you survey the incredible mosaic of television screens in serried ranks above the pits. Some of them are an electronic update of the old tickertape machines, while others display news broadcasts of particular interest to traders, brokers, and their clients.

There’s a peppy, sixteen-minute film shown for the benefit of visitors, which strives for simplicity and comprehensibility, actually succeeding, for the most part. Taking one of several vertiginous escalators between floors, you may visit the in-house art gallery, showing graphic works reflecting the Board of Trade experience. A small exhibition of historic objects and ephemera will please those with a nostalgic bent.