Prudential Plaza

Prudential Plaza defines the skyline with its massive, stepped profile and the bright, illuminated crown that lights up the Chicago night. Completed in nineteen fifty-five, the building served as the first major skyscraper constructed in the city after the Great Depression. It rose on the former site of a railyard, where the developer, Colonel Henry Crown, gambled that air rights above active tracks held immense value. The skyscraper housed the Prudential Insurance Company and fundamentally shifted the city's commercial center eastward.