Manhattan Apartments

The Manhattan Building at four hundred thirty-one South Dearborn Street is recognizable by the row of distinctive, projecting bay windows that create a rhythmic, jagged pattern up its sixteen-story facade. Completed in eighteen ninety-one, this structure was designed by architect William LeBaron Jenney. It stands as the oldest surviving skyscraper in the world to be constructed with a purely skeletal steel frame, an engineering breakthrough that allowed architects to abandon the thick, load-bearing masonry walls that had limited the height of previous buildings.