LaSalle Street Canyon

Chicago's LaSalle Street canyon is usually photographed from deep inside the financial district, where the buildings rise tightly around the viewer and the Chicago Board of Trade commands the end of the street. I wanted a different beginning.

I made this photograph from just north of the LaSalle Street Bridge over the Chicago River. The bridge occupies much of the foreground, its curving ironwork rising on both sides before dropping toward the long corridor of buildings beyond. At the far end, the Board of Trade stands precisely where the street seems to converge.

I had been walking downtown with my camera that June morning, but this was a photograph I intended to make. I spent about fifteen minutes near the bridge, testing compositions and waiting for traffic to cooperate. It was early, before most people had arrived for work, and LaSalle Street still felt unusually quiet.

Each attempt depended on the traffic signal behind me. When it turned red and the bridge cleared, I stepped into the center of the street, composed quickly, and moved away before traffic resumed. I made several versions. This frame had the fewest cars and the strongest balance.

The vertical composition felt natural. LaSalle Street is defined by height. Its skyscrapers form tall, nearly continuous walls, while the bridge and roadway pull the viewer directly between them. I am always looking for leading lines, and here the painted markings nearly form an arrow. The bridge adds another set of lines, softer and more expressive, guiding the eye from its curved steelwork into the rigid architecture of the canyon.

LaSalle Street has long represented Chicago's financial center. Banks, brokerage firms, law offices, trading companies, and other institutions filled the buildings along this corridor, giving it a reputation as the financial spine of the city. At its southern end stands the current Chicago Board of Trade Building, completed in 1930 and designed by Holabird & Root. Its Art Deco tower is crowned by John Storrs' aluminum figure of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain, an appropriate symbol for a building rooted in commodities trading.

For me, this was never only a famous architectural view. LaSalle Street was part of daily life. My bus often carried me across this bridge and down the canyon toward the Rookery. Many of my patients worked in these buildings. The offices rising through the photograph held people I knew, treated, and saw year after year. This part of downtown felt like home.

Black and white brings the photograph back to its essential elements. The tones, textures, steel, stone, windows, and repeating vertical lines become the subject. Color would compete with the structure. Without it, the variety of architecture along the corridor becomes easier to see.

The Board of Trade provides the destination, but the bridge makes the photograph. Its iron curves open the scene, the roadway points forward, and the surrounding skyscrapers close in gradually around the view. Together they turn a familiar Chicago street into a carefully ordered passage through the city's architectural and financial history.