DRAKE HOTEL PLANS ANNEX OF 40 STORIES

By:  Al Chase December 3, 1927

(Chicago Tribune) - Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive will have its first forty story tower and the Drake Hotel its first furnished and unfurnished apartments if plans now being considered for a skyscraping annex adjoining that hostelry on the east are carried out.

Benjamin H. Marshall, formerly a member of the architectural firm of Marshall & Fox, which designed the original Drake, is preparing preliminary sketches for the towering annex, covering all of the vacant ground between the Lake Shore Drive hotel and the Drake, which will practically double the capacity of the hotel.

Available Site Described.

The Drake interests own one of the worlds outstanding hotel sites, fronting 400 feet on Lake Shore Drive and 217 feet on upper Michigan Avenue, as well as a 400 foot frontage south on Walton Place.  The present thirteen story hotel occupies only 290 feet of the Lake Shore Drive frontage.  The proposed apartment annex will occupy the remaining 110 feet of frontage on the drive.  It will, of course, extend back to Walton Place the same depth as the main hotel.

Tentative plans call for connections between the annex and main hotel at several floors.  This means Drake apartment dwellers will have complete hotel service available if desired.

Alternative Plan Proposed.

If the height of forty stories is decided upon, the enlarged Drake structure will dominate the gold coast.  An alternative height suggestion is a roof line slightly higher than the Lake Shore Drive hotel to the east.

Tracy C. Drake, president of the Drake Hotel Company, declined to make any comment on the project, saying he couldn’t give out any report at this time.

« Back