The north side of Randolph Street featured two very noteworthy buildings at either end of the block between LaSalle Street on the west and Clark Street on the east. Pictured here at the west end is a five-story store-and-office building. Between them one sees what the fastidious Frederick Francis Cook called "a depressed line of two-story tumble-down frames, dating from the [eighteen-]thirties, the street floors devoted to free lunch resorts, while the second stories were polluted by so-called 'justice' offices, and their 'shyster' hangers-on." Architect Helmut Jahn's strikingly contemporary James R. Thompson Center now fills the entire block.
