Michigan Avenue just north of the Chicago River is architectural eye candy. There’s the gleaming white Wrigley Building on the west, the Tribune Tower with its flying buttresses on the east, and beyond that is the InterContinental Chicago, an art deco skyscraper with a distinctive yellow dome.
That dome is the crown of a madcap building that’s the embodiment of the organization that created it.
In the midst of the roaring twenties, Chicago’s Shriners decided they needed their own athletic club. Sure, they could have gone to the Chicago Athletic Association, but that was filled with fuddy-duddies and the Shriners were anything but.
An offshoot of the Freemasons, the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, as the group was officially known, was all about having fun.
As in, that’s why the order was created in the first place.
Want to hear the story of InterContinental Chicago instead of reading it? Get the audiobook and e-book of Living Landmarks of Chicago for one price!
In the 1870s a small group of New York Freemasons, including actor Billy Florence and Walter Fleming, M.D., felt that the fraternity, while worthwhile, was a bit too stoic for their tastes.
After attending a party hosted by an Arabian diplomat during a trip to France, Billy was inspired by the event’s “exotic style, flavors and music.”
When he got back home he suggested an Arabic theme to Walter. The good doctor, who was savvy in the ways of Freemason rituals, agreed, and between the two they created their own fraternity based on fun, fellowship, and philanthropy.
They weren’t complete rebels, though—you had to be a third-degree mason before you were eligible to become a Shriner.
By the early 1900s, the group had spread across the country and into Canada, Mexico, and Panama.
In 1912, the Chicago Shriners built their Medinah Temple with a 4,200-seat auditorium and topped with an onion dome, and in June 1925 they laid the cornerstone for a new Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children at Oak Park and Belden.
In November of that year, the Fez-wearing gents announced their next big project: the Medinah Athletic Club. This “towering clubhouse” would be designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager.
(Ostensibly he won a design contest, but he was considered a shoe-in. It probably didn’t hurt that he was a member of the club.)
The architect described it as “a tower of the Orient, a Saracenic tower, proudly piercing the sky with its gold pear shaped dome and many minarets.”
In addition to offering all of the expected amenities of a men’s athletic club, it would also have hotel rooms. The entire tower, all forty-plus stories of it, would only be open to members and their guests.
The tower would be a fitting home for the “party animals of Freemasonry,” as CBS reporter Mo Rocca would later call the Shriners. In an era when the goal of entertainment was escape, Ahlschlager, who’d designed the Roxy Theatre in New York, created a vertical version of 1920s opulent movie palaces.
From its onion dome to the three Sumerian guards on the twelfth floor to the friezes a few stories below them, the Medinah Athletic Club would bring the Middle East to Michigan Avenue.
Those friezes, envisioned by theater designer George Unger and carved by Leon Harment, represented the stages of construction: Contribution, or the gathering of materials; Wisdom, depicting a ruler conferring with his counselors and architects; and Consecration.
According to a September 16, 1928, article in the Chicago Tribune, the latter shows a priest “sacrificing a white bull whose blood will be mixed with crushed grapes and poured into the earth.”
While the Shriners didn’t sacrifice any livestock, they did install a time capsule. Inside they placed a copy of the article announcing the building, a roster of all the members, and photos of the officers, among other historical knick-knacks.
Some of the men were also memorialized on the outside of the building— Unger used faces of club members as models for the characters in the friezes.
Once a Shriner entered, he stepped into a world of whimsical time travel. There was the Hall of Lions, set in ancient Assyria, and King Arthur’s Court, a smoking lounge decorated with murals that depicted the Medieval king’s timeline.
That room also had the bonus of hidden panels where booze could be stored – it was Prohibition, after all.
The Spanish Tea Court brought him forward to the time of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Any women who chose to enter this male sanctuary had to use a separate entrance, and they had to be chaperoned anywhere the ceiling wasn’t painted blue, which was most places.
The time travel continued even for the ladies, though; their Renaissance Room reflected the elegant era of Louis XVI, and included a loggia overlooking Michigan Avenue.
The athletic facilities for these fun-loving party animals were a playground of “ooh ooh ooh! You know what else we need? We need miniature golf!” and so they had it.
Way up on the twenty-third floor, the Shriners could attempt to avoid water hazards as they went for a hole-in-one.
There were the standard amenities, like a running track and a gymnasium, but they also had a bowling alley, and an archery range, and a shooting range, and a two-story boxing arena.
They added a swimming pool, but instead of doing something easy like installing it in the first couple of floors, Ahlschlager put it on the fourteenth—above the Grand Ballroom and its 12,000 pound crystal chandelier.
It wasn’t just any old place to swim laps. It was a glorious bathing stadium, with seats for spectators, a fountain of Neptune, gorgeous Spanish majolica tiles, and stained glass windows decorated like fish scales.
Many years later, architecture critic Paul Gapp would call the limestone-skinned building a “belovedly extravagant architectural concoction.”
That extravagance made the persistent and oft-repeated rumor that the dome was designed as a dock for dirigibles plausible.
However, an extensive search of newspaper archives failed to unearth a single reference to either plans for or use as a dock. Sometimes, as was the case with their Medinah Temple, a dome might be just a dome.
A few months after this man cave to end all man caves opened, the economy closed.
The stock market crashed October 24, 1929, but the Shriners were able to hold onto their private, members-only club for an incredible five years, even with low occupancy.
In 1934, the building was turned into apartments until developer John Mack bought it in 1944 and reopened it as, coincidentally, since it had no connection to future owners, the Continental Hotel.
Three years later, the Sheraton chain bought it and renamed it the Sheraton. In 1961, they built a 26-story tower to the north.
The Radisson took over in the late 1970s, but it was only open for a few years before it became the Hotel Continental. Then it closed, too.
Finally, Inter-Continental bought the property and invested millions. They turned the north tower into their budget brand, the Forum Hotel, which opened in 1989, and the historic tower opened as the Inter-Continental in 1990.
The restoration was, as the Tribune’s Gapp said, carried out with great skill. Fortunately, they could see exactly what it used to look like because a former member heard about the renovation and donated his 1930 Scimitar, the club’s yearbook.
Even with that visual aid, returning the club to its original magnificence took some doing.
In the years since the Shriners had left, someone had slathered paint and plaster over just about everything that made the place unique.
Not only that, a thief had stolen eight original paintings from an elevator lobby outside the Renaissance Room. To remove the paint in the Hall of Lions they used finely-ground corn husks; any other method would have been too corrosive.
Lido Lippi, the master painter who’d consulted on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel and, closer to home, restored the frescoes in the Hilton Chicago and would soon do the same for the Palmer House’s ceiling, did his magic at the Inter-Continental.
Not only did he restore nearly forty paintings in the Grand Ballroom, he also recreated those that had been stolen.
InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile Today
In the mid-’90s, InterContinental got rid of Forum and merged the towers into one hotel.
Today’s InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile is the only hotel with doors that open to that storied thoroughfare.
In the years since, they’ve invested millions in multiple restorations, including updating the rooms in the Grand Tower in 2023. The result is a luxurious hotel that also feels like a trip into a time machine.
Click here to book a room at this piece of living history.
More articles to help you explore Chicago:
- You’ll never be bored with these best things to do in Chicago
- Chicago on a budget: how to save money in the Windy City
- Road trips from Chicago, for when you want to get out of town
- Chicago in winter: yes, the city’s “cool” in winter, too!
- Tiptoe through the tulips during Chicago in spring
- Chicago in summer is delightful
- Discover why the Field Museum is the beloved institution that almost wasn’t
- Learn the romantic story behind the Palmer House Hilton (it’s not the one you’ve heard)
- See why Navy Pier is one of Chicago’s top tourist attractions
- How one man’s vision became the Museum of Science and Industry