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Merchandise Mart

1930 establishments in IllinoisAll pages needing cleanupArt Deco architecture in IllinoisBuildings and structures completed in 1930Kennedy family
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design basic silver certified buildingsSkyscrapers in ChicagoWholesale markets
Merchandise Mart
Merchandise Mart

The Merchandise Mart (or the Merch Mart, or the Mart) is a commercial building located in downtown Chicago, Illinois. When it was opened in 1930, it was the largest building in the world, with 4 million square feet (372,000 m2) of floor space. The Art Deco structure is located at the junction of the Chicago River's branches. The building is a leading retailing and wholesale location, hosting 20,000 visitors and tenants per day in the late 2000s.Built by Marshall Field & Co. and later owned for over half a century by the Kennedy family, the Mart centralized Chicago's wholesale goods business by consolidating architectural and interior design vendors and trades under a single roof. It has since become home to several other enterprises, including the Shops at the Mart, the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Art, Motorola Mobility, the Grainger Technology Group branch of W.W. Grainger, and the Chicago tech startup center 1871. It was sold in January 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust.The Merchandise Mart is so large that it had its own ZIP Code (60654) until 2008, when the Postal Service assigned the ZIP Code to part of the surrounding area. In 2010, the building opened its Design Center showrooms to the public.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Merchandise Mart (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Merchandise Mart
Merchandise Mart Plaza, Chicago Near North Side

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N 41.8884 ° E -87.6355 °
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The Merchandise Mart

Merchandise Mart Plaza 222
60654 Chicago, Near North Side
Illinois, United States
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Merchandise Mart
Merchandise Mart
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Chicago River
Chicago River

The Chicago River is a system of rivers and canals with a combined length of 156 miles (251 km) that runs through the city of Chicago, including its center (the Chicago Loop). Though not especially long, the river is notable because it is one of the reasons for Chicago's geographic importance: the related Chicago Portage is a link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The river is also noteworthy for its natural and human-engineered history. In 1887, the Illinois General Assembly decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River through civil engineering by taking water from Lake Michigan and discharging it into the Mississippi River watershed, partly in response to concerns created by an extreme weather event in 1885 that threatened the city's water supply. In 1889, the Illinois General Assembly created the Chicago Sanitary District (now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District) to replace the Illinois and Michigan Canal with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a much larger waterway, because the former had become inadequate to serve the city's increasing sewage and commercial navigation needs. Completed by 1900, the project reversed the flow of the main stem and South Branch of the Chicago River by using a series of canal locks and increasing the flow from Lake Michigan into the river, causing the river to empty into the new canal instead. In 1999, the system was named a "Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium" by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).The river is represented on the Municipal Flag of Chicago by two horizontal blue stripes. Its three branches serve as the inspiration for the Municipal Device, a three-branched, Y-shaped symbol that is found on many buildings and other structures throughout Chicago.