Merchandise Around the World serves as a welcome to more than 38,000 visitors and tenants passing through the lobby every day. In 1945 Kennedy formed a trust to buy the Merchandise Mart, an enormous sales center in Chicago built by Marshall Field, which was the world’s largest building at the time. Each panel is a market scene from a different country: Turkish rugs and textiles being sold in a bazaar next to a mosque silk and pottery markets near Japan’s Mount Fuji sleighs carrying furs in Russia, commercial ships in Germany, a caravan of camels carrying Egyptian cotton pass a pyramid and merchants selling their wares in Switzerland. The panels are delicately colored in rose, green, brown, and cream with metal leaf background details. Guerin collaborated with the architecture firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White for the commission of the Merchandise Mart’s mural series. The Merchandise Mart’s lavish entrance faces the water and features a 17-panel mural that is “a panorama of the world’s commerce and industry.” Titled Merchandise Around the World (1930) and created by Jules Guerin (1866–1946), the mural is visible between square marble pillars that form a colonnade in the main atrium. Even after more than 80 years, this Art Deco landmark continues to be a leading retailing and wholesale destination, attracting people from all over the world. Finished in 1930 and massive in its construction, The Mart serves as a monument to early 20th-century merchandising and architecture. At the Merchandise Mart, everything is first-rate.The Merchandise Mart, towering 25 stories at its highest point and occupying four million square feet, rests along the Chicago River as the epicenter of downtown Chicago life, culture, media, and business. One purchase, a grand mirror for our entryway, took two weeks to be shipped from England. Is a visit to the Merchandise Mart a once-in-a-lifetime experience? My wife and I vividly recall going on a day-long shopping trip with a home designer to buy new furniture for our apartment. The lobby features artist Jules Guerin's frieze of 17 murals which graphically illustrate commerce throughout the world. Since 1969, the Merchandise Mart has hosted the annual National Exposition of Contract Furnishings with over 1,000 exhibitors and 50,000 attendees, the largest trade show of his kind in North America. In addition, a 521-room Holiday Inn is housed in the Apparel Center. The retail shopping area, named The Shops at the Mart, opened in 1991 and includes apparel shops, beauty services, news stands and bookstores, financial services, travel services, telecommunications services, specialty food and wine stores, photo services, a dry cleaner, shoe shine stand and food court. Since 2010, the design center showroom has been open to the public. In 1977, the Chicago Apparel Center was opened on the west side of Orleans Street, increasing the Merchandise Mart's total floor space to 6.2 million square feet. Visitors also marvel at the 7.5 miles of corridors and 30 elevators. By the early 1900s, the Second Industrial Revolution had brought assembly lines to factories, and the disassembly line to Chicago’s slaughterhouses, and it had seen electrification, telegraphs, and the railroads span the North American continent. Its construction required 29 million bricks, 40 miles of plumbing, 380 miles of wiring, 4 million cubic yards of concrete and 4,000 windows. Yet, when the Mart opened on, no economic revolution was already established. Opened in 1930, the 25-story Art Deco style structure is spread across two square city blocks and includes 4.2 million square feet of floor space. Built by Marshall Field & Company and owned by the Kennedy family for half a century, it centralized Chicago's wholesale goods business by consolidating architectural and interior design vendors and traders under a single roof. But have you ever spent any time inside the building? Have you ever been inside the world's largest commercial building, a structure so large that it once had its own zip code, a building so massive that it has been known as "a city within a city?" Located at 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, at Kinzie Street between Orleans and Wells, on the Chicago River just east of Chicago's original trading post at Wolf Point, the junction of the river's North and South Branches, in downtown Chicago, the Merchandise Mart is a leading retailing and wholesale destination that hosts 20,000 visitors and tenants per day. If you are a native Chicagoan or have ever visited the city, you probably walked past or drove past the Merchandise Mart.
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