Page 160 - WINE DINE AND TRAVEL SPRING 2025 GRAND VOYAGE

said the hotel cost $800,000 to build, which
"This beautiful building has a wonderful
vibe and not only for the way it was
painstakingly restored," Jean Lieber, a CAA
concierge, told me and several guests on a
recent tour.
"When it was built to coincide with the
Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893 - just
a little more than two decades after the
Great Chicago Fire that killed 300 and left
more than 100,000 homeless - city fathers
and the backers of the hotel wanted to
show that Chicago had recovered and was
much more than a meatpacking town."
"And it wasn't long before many of the
men who were movers and shakers in the
Windy City belonged to the Chicago Ath-
letic Association," explained Leiber, who
160 WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE SPRING 2025
is roughly $21 million today.
William Wrigley, owner of the Chicago
Cubs; five-time Olympic gold medal swim-
ming champion Johnny Weissmuller, who
later played Tarzan in movies; and archi-
tect Daniel Burnham, a founding member
of the CAA who designed the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair; were members. So was Mar-
shall Field of department store fame.
"But not all of Chicago's bigwigs got in,"
she said.
Charles Comiskey, who owned the
Chicago White Sox, applied repeatedly, but
was never accepted, she said. It didn't help
that Comiskey, a notorious skinflint, owned
the White Sox during the 1919 World Series
"Black Sox" scandal, when eight of his
players were accused of throwing the se-
ries in exchange for money.
The hotel was designed by Henry Ives
Cobb, a famed 19th Century architect. It
opened as a private men's club with an or-
nate Drawing Room, a swimming pool,
Turkish baths, several restaurants, small,
almost dorm-like hotel rooms and, during
Prohibition, a speakeasy. Though they were
permitted in some spaces, women weren't
allowed to be members until the 1970s.
In its heyday, Muddy Waters, the father
of Chicago Blues, performed here. Jazz pi-
anist and composer Duke Ellington "tickled
the ivories" at the CAA, the hotel proudly
notes.
Alas, membership dwindled and the
building had fallen on hard times by the
turn of the 21st Century. It shut down in
2007 while its fate hung in limbo.
But after what the Chicago Architecture
Center calls a "few perilous years," the bil-
lionaire Pritzker family, who own the Hyatt
Hotels chain, bought the building and initi-
ated what Lieber called a "meticulous
restoration," led by Chicago-based
Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture.
The result was a posh, 240-room bou-