Our History
Built for the World’s Fair, renamed in 1908, and still across Michigan Avenue from Grant Park.
The world came to Chicago in 1893. This is where it stayed.
For more than 130 years, the Congress has welcomed fairgoers, presidents, bandleaders, soldiers, and families. Here’s how a World’s Fair hotel became a Chicago landmark.
Before the Hotel
Long before there was a hotel here, there was a street. Our name followed it across Michigan Avenue into Grant Park, and you can still walk that same route from our front door.
In 1908 the Auditorium Annex took its new name from right outside. The hotel stood on Congress Street, beside the Congress Plaza section of Grant Park, so it became the Congress Hotel, and in time the Congress Plaza Hotel.
The plaza is still there. Step out our door, cross Michigan Avenue, and walk between the Bowman and the Spearman: you’re standing in the place that gave us our name.
From a Street to a Plaza
The street outside was first named Tyler Street, for President John Tyler. In 1872 the City Council renamed it Congress Street. The council’s records don’t say why, but Tyler was the only former president to side with the Confederacy.
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago made Congress Street the city’s central axis, running from Grant Park on the lakefront west to a grand new civic center.
Bennett went on to design Congress Plaza, the park entrance at the foot of Congress Street, with its stairs, fountains, and gardens. In 1928 Ivan Meštrović’s Bowman and Spearman took their places on either side.
The hotel opened as the Auditorium Annex to house the crowds arriving for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Developer R. H. Southgate built it, and Clinton J. Warren designed the north tower across Congress Street from Adler & Sullivan’s Auditorium Building.
A marble-lined passage under the street, known as Peacock Alley, connected the annex to the Auditorium Hotel next door.
Between 1902 and 1907 the architects Holabird & Roche added the south tower and a grand banquet hall, one of the first ballrooms in America to be air-conditioned. By 1908 the hotel had more than 1,000 guest rooms.
The Annex took a new name from its address: the Congress Hotel, on Congress Street beside the Congress Plaza section of Grant Park (how the name came to be). Within a few years electric outlets and desk lamps replaced chandeliers in the guest rooms.
In June 1912, with the Republican National Convention in town, Theodore Roosevelt made the Congress his Chicago home. He was one of many presidents to stay, which is how the hotel came to be called the “Home of Presidents” (see who stayed).
The painter E. Martin Hennings covered the Florentine Room’s barrel-vaulted ceiling with murals. More than a century later, couples still say their vows beneath them.
In the 1930s the former Elizabethan Room became a nightclub with a bandstand. In 1935 it was the stage for an NBC radio show featuring Benny Goodman, broadcasting from the hotel to the country.
When World War II began, the government bought the hotel for the Army. It reopened to civilian guests in 1944 and was soon busy again with summer political conventions.
Pick Hotels bought the hotel in 1950, and it became known as the Pick-Congress. A remodel from 1950 to 1952 created a mural-encircled lobby and a new front desk, new Congressional and Presidential Suites, and a supper club called the Glass Hat. In 1952 Albert Pick Jr. commissioned new murals from the painter Louis Grell.
A second modernization in the early 1960s built a new ballroom and added escalators, still a novelty for hotels at the time. Conventions, proms and banquets filled the event floors.
The hotel changed hands in 1987 and ran independently for nearly four decades, outside the national chains, keeping its own name and its own character.
The hotel reached 125 years at 520 South Michigan Avenue: the same address, the same view of Grant Park, and the same red sign on the roof.
In 2026 the Congress Plaza Hotel joined the Wyndham hotel brand, opening a new chapter for a hotel that has welcomed guests on Michigan Avenue since 1893. The address and the view across the street to Grant Park stay the same.
More than 800 rooms, newly renovated guest rooms alongside the classic ones, the mosaic lobby, the Gold Room and the Florentine Room, and the same address across from Grant Park. The ceilings still rise up to 14 ft.
Home of Presidents
So many presidents stayed at the Congress that it became known as the “Home of Presidents.”
22nd & 24th President · 1885–1889, 1893–1897
25th President · 1897–1901
26th President · 1901–1909
27th President · 1909–1913
29th President · 1921–1923
30th President · 1923–1929
Seen at the Congress
Theodore Roosevelt speaking from the Congress Hotel, photographed by the Bain News Service, most likely during the 1912 Republican National Convention, when he made the hotel his Chicago headquarters.
1912 on the TimelinePhotos: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Cleveland (1892), McKinley (c. 1900), Roosevelt (Pach Brothers, 1904), Taft (1908), Harding (Harris & Ewing), Coolidge (Notman Studio, 1919), Roosevelt at the Congress (George Grantham Bain Collection)
Guests & Legends
Booked into the hotel’s Urban Room for a month in November 1935, Goodman’s band drew such crowds that the hotel kept it on into 1936, and its nightly NBC broadcasts from the room carried swing across the country.
When the Democrats met in Chicago in 1932, Jim Farley ran Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign for the nomination from a suite at the Congress. Time magazine covered the dealing under the headline “Congress Hotel Deal.”
Every grand Chicago hotel has a Capone story, and ours is a good one. As it’s told, Scarface kept Suite 400 and had its bathroom refitted with an escape route into the tunnels beneath the city.
Photos: Benny Goodman (William P. Gottlieb, 1946), Franklin D. Roosevelt (Harris & Ewing, 1932), Al Capone (Wide World Photos, 1930)
From the Archive
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