Tower Building

A six-story store and office building at the southwest corner of Sixth and Olive, sheathed in glazed white terra cotta over a steel frame, with a reinforced concrete addition built to match. Narrow, unbroken white piers and spandrels gridded both street fronts in the spare manner of the Chicago Commercial style, each bay filled with wide windows divided by thin mullions and transom bars. Bead molding edged the spandrels, a band of rosettes set in quatrefoils ran across the panels over the first and second floors, and above the sixth floor egg-and-dart molding ran beneath a bracketed cornice and a plain terra cotta parapet. At the street, the entrances sat back behind glass display cases, giving the storefronts the depth of an arcade, with a mezzanine above.

George F. Tower Jr. had wanted a skyscraper on Olive Street since 1897, when he announced a twenty-story Tower Building for the northeast corner of Seventh and Olive. He gave up that corner to the Railway Exchange syndicate late in 1911 and turned to his own lot at the southwest corner of Sixth and Olive, again with a twenty-story building in mind. Instead, in 1913, he built six stories on part of the lot, two bays wide, to designs by Albert B. Groves, against the east wall of the Erker Building at 608 Olive. Groves also designed Tower's narrow building at 610 Olive. In 1920 Tower leased the building to Boyd's, the city's leading men's clothier, and extended it two bays east to the corner and eight bays down Sixth Street. The addition, built of reinforced concrete under the supervision of Tom P. Barnett, followed Groves's white terra cotta grid, and the older section was remodeled to match and given a mezzanine. A small addition in 1929 filled in the upper floors of one bay on Sixth. The nomination marks its completion as the end of the white terra cotta era on Olive Street. Boyd's, later Boyd-Richardson, spread into 608 and 610 Olive and stayed for decades. The building was listed on the National Register in 1986 as part of the Olive Street Terra Cotta District and was demolished in 1988.