InterContinental Chicago / Medinah Athletic Club
No other building on the Magnificent Mile announces its ambitions as extravagantly as the 1929 Medinah Athletic Club tower: a 42-story Art Deco skyscraper dressed in Mesopotamian motifs, Assyrian friezes, and a golden-domed crown that makes no apologies for its own magnificence.
At a glance
The building at 505 North Michigan Avenue was commissioned by the Medinah Shriners (the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine) and designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager. Completed in 1929 at the end of the decade’s great skyscraper boom, it combined the functional requirements of a luxury athletic club — swimming pools, a gymnasium, a running track, and banquet rooms — with the ornamental ambition of an order whose identity was defined by theatrical exoticism. The Near Eastern motifs that cover its tower were not applied as surface decoration but were integral to the Shriners’ brand: the same iconography appeared on their fezzes, their charters, and their parades.
Key facts
- Built: 1929
- Architect: Walter W. Ahlschlager
- Address: 505 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
- Height: 42 stories
- Style: Art Deco with Near Eastern (Mesopotamian/Assyrian) motifs
- Original client: Medinah Shriners (Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine)
- Current use: InterContinental Chicago hotel (since 1988)
- GPS: 41.8909°N, 87.6249°W
History
The Shrine of North America — a Masonic-adjacent fraternal organization known for its fezzes, its charitable work (primarily children’s hospitals), and its spectacular parades — reached the peak of its financial power in the 1920s. The Chicago chapter commissioned an athletic club that would serve as both a members’ facility and a monument to the organization’s prestige. Ahlschlager’s design placed the athletic facilities (a swimming pool on the 14th floor, a running track higher still) inside a skyscraper tower, with the lower floors given over to retail and office tenants to generate income.
The building opened in 1929 at the very end of the construction boom. The Depression that followed hit the Shriners hard: they sold the building in 1934. Over the following decades it served as a hotel under various names before InterContinental Hotels acquired it in 1988 and undertook a major restoration. The flagship InterContinental Chicago operation occupies the lower floors of both the 1929 building and an adjacent tower added in 1961.
Ahlschlager’s choice of Near Eastern ornament was not arbitrary: it aligned the building’s skin with the Shriners’ adopted iconographic system, giving the facade a coherence that more generic Art Deco towers of the period lack. The king, the sphinx, the palmette, and the horned disc of Assyrian religious iconography appear on the building’s terra cotta panels as a consistent vocabulary rather than a random sampler of exotic motifs.
What you see
The tower rises from a retail base on Michigan Avenue to a shaft that narrows in a series of setbacks toward the characteristic feature of the building: a small onion dome that crowns the topmost setback tower. The dome — gold-colored and visually light — is the punctuation mark of the whole composition, readable from miles away along Michigan Avenue. Below it, the upper floors are treated with stylized Assyrian friezes: winged figures, bearded kings in profile, and the geometric patterns derived from Mesopotamian cylinder seals. These are not archaeological recreations but Deco interpretations — the ornamental vocabulary translated into the flat planes and simplified lines that the 1920s skyscraper facade demanded.
At street level the building is urbane and restrained: storefronts and a hotel entrance that could belong to any well-dressed Michigan Avenue building. The drama is all overhead — in the upper setbacks, in the polychrome terra cotta panels, and in the dome that brings the whole tower to a stop with a punctuation mark that is simultaneously exotic and unmistakably American in its confidence.
Practical information
- Access: The hotel lobby is open to visitors; the historic 14th-floor pool and some public spaces are accessible during hotel operating hours
- Hotel tours: The InterContinental offers periodic architectural tours; check the hotel concierge for current schedule
- Photography: The tower crown is best photographed from Michigan Avenue looking north, or from across the Chicago River on the Riverwalk
- Time needed: 20–30 minutes for exterior; add 30 minutes for a lobby visit and pool-level viewing
Getting there
The building is on the Magnificent Mile at Michigan Avenue and Grand Avenue. The nearest CTA stops are Grand on the Red Line (2 minutes on foot) and Chicago on the Red and Brown lines (0.5 miles south). The Chicago Architecture Center is 1 mile south on Wacker Drive and offers tours that pass the building.
Nearby
- Tribune Tower (Gothic Revival, 1925) — 0.3 miles south on Michigan Avenue
- Wrigley Building (1924) — immediately south, visible from the entrance
- Chicago River and architectural boat tours — 0.3 miles south
- Water Tower Place (1976) and Chicago Water Tower (1869) — 0.5 miles north
Sources
- Chicago Landmark designation report, Medinah Athletic Club Building
- InterContinental Chicago hotel historical documentation
- Chicago Architecture Center, “505 North Michigan Avenue — InterContinental Chicago”
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