{"id":43353,"date":"2025-07-06T12:31:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T12:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/43353\/"},"modified":"2025-07-06T12:31:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T12:31:10","slug":"chicago-board-of-trade-museum-pays-homage-to-citys-trading-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/43353\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicago Board of Trade museum pays homage to city’s trading history"},"content":{"rendered":"

A museum dedicated to preserving the legacy of open outcry trading opens Tuesday inside the Chicago Board of Trade Building, the latest step in an effort to revive the nearly century-old structure.<\/p>\n

Much of the frantic trading activity in the building \u2014 immortalized in movies like \u201cFerris Bueller\u2019s Day Off\u201d and \u201cThe Dark Knight\u201d \u2014 now occurs digitally, leaving its cavernous main trading floor quiet and empty. But in the Chicago Board of Trade Building Museum, architecture buffs, other visitors and the building\u2019s many office tenants will be able to experience what it was like to be on the trading floors, and see how generations of Chicago\u2019s leading architects created the historic landmark.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to find a way to honor that legacy,\u201d said Gary Stoltz, chief design and development officer of R2 Cos.<\/p>\n

The company took over operations at the 44-story art deco skyscraper in 2023 after the previous owner, battered by the post-pandemic office market, surrendered control in late 2022 to its lender Apollo Global Management. R2 Cos. has so far spent $11 million renovating the building on the southern end of the LaSalle Street canyon at 141 W. Jackson Blvd., including the new museum and spiffing up the rooftop deck, lobbies and atriums.<\/p>\n

Those renovations, along with other exhibits paying tribute to Chicago\u2019s trading history, helped bring in many new tenants, making the Board of Trade one of the few buildings to thrive as the downtown office market struggles to recover.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve done about 600,000 square feet of leasing in the last two and a half years,\u201d including about 280,000 square feet of new leases, said Matt Pistorio, a R2 Cos. partner. \u201cI would say there are only one or two other office buildings in the city of Chicago which have done as much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although nearly 30% of downtown office space is either empty or available for rent, a historic high, an increasing number of downtown office users are checking out new spaces<\/a>, according to Savills, a commercial real estate firm. Most gravitate either toward the city\u2019s new trophy properties in the West Loop or Fulton Market, or toward renovated properties where owners were willing to spend on new amenities, said Robert Sevim, Savills\u2019 president for the Chicago region.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Chicago Board of Trade Building is a good example,\u201d he said. \u201cThese buildings are the most sought after, and these are the spaces that are going to be flying off the shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raucous trading pits, where generations of brokers shouted orders for agricultural products and other commodities, started shutting down about 10 years ago as computerized trading took over. The CME Group, a merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, closed most of its open trading pits during the pandemic. But Cboe Global Markets, founded in 1973 as the Chicago Board Options Exchange, opened in 2022 a new group of trading pits on the Chicago Board of Trade Building\u2019s seventh and eighth floors.<\/p>\n

The building still hosts many other trading firms, Pistorio said. Total occupancy for the building is nearly 75%, and should increase soon.<\/p>\n

\"GaryGary Stoltz, left, and Matt Pistorio, of R2 Cos., a private equity real estate firm, give a tour of the Chicago Board of Trade Museum as a video history of the building is projected on a screen on July 1, 2025. (John J. Kim\/Chicago Tribune)
\n\"GaryGary Stoltz, director of design and development at R2 Cos., a private equity real estate firm, walks into a traders’ bank vault in the basement of the Chicago Board of Trade Building during a tour on July 1, 2025, in Chicago. (John J. Kim\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe stabilized the rent roll by doing a lot of renewals, and hope to be in the mid-80s in the next year or so,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The street-level museum includes a theater and giant screen that illustrates how the 1930 building, designed by Holabird & Root and for decades Chicago\u2019s tallest, rose on the site of the original trading exchange. It also tracks the rise of the 1980s addition designed by noted architect Helmut Jahn, designer of the nearby James R. Thompson Center, which Google will occupy next year<\/a>. Other exhibits include recorded testimonies from traders about what life was like on the trading floor, photos and a projected art display visible at night from blocks away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want people to know that there is something going on at the end of the block,\u201d Pistorio said.<\/p>\n

Stoltz said the building already gets about 1,000 visitors every month, often school tours or others interested in the sleek art deco lobbies. And with most of the open trading pits shut down, the museum will give visitors a better sense of the building\u2019s historic role in Chicago\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people want to see the trading floor they saw in \u2018Ferris Bueller,\u2019 so we thought we could bring the energy of trading to our visitors, and show the architecture of the trading floors,\u201d Stoltz said.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn art deco-style drawing of Ceres, the Greek goddess of agriculture, is displayed on a wall in a second-floor lobby at the Chicago Board of Trade Building on July 1, 2025. (John J. Kim\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n

The museum was supported by a $250,000 small-business improvement grant from the city, he said. Similar grants were given in 2024 to local restaurants,<\/a> all clustered around LaSalle Street and still recovering from the pandemic, including Ceres Cafe in the Chicago Board of Trade Building and Goddess and the Baker.<\/p>\n

Stoltz said the building\u2019s renovation is ongoing. R2 Cos. may revive the lower level, possibly transforming the massive underground vault and safety deposit boxes, where traders once stored important papers, into an event space. A long-term possibility is reopening the slanted roof\u2019s glass-walled observation deck and visitor center, closed in the 1970s, and just below the iconic, three-story statue of Roman goddess Ceres.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s going to be one of the hardest projects to pull off,\u201d Stoltz said.<\/p>\n

Originally Published: July 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM CDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A museum dedicated to preserving the legacy of open outcry trading opens Tuesday inside the Chicago Board of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":43354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[64,960,5386,1818,1370,728,4329,1072],"class_list":{"0":"post-43353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-local-news","14":"tag-real-estate","15":"tag-things-to-do"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114806305820708558","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}