Chicago Athletic Association, part of Hyatt

A 19th-Century Athletic Club Becomes a Hotel

Chicago Athletic Association occupies a building designed in 1893 by Henry Ives Cobb, the same year Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, as a Venetian Gothic clubhouse of rosy brick, limestone columns, and pointed arches. It was built for the Chicago Athletic Association, a club for the city's elite where members like Cyrus McCormick and Marshall Field once exercised, dined, and danced. The club closed in 2007 as membership declined, and a group led by John Pritzker bought the building in 2012, reopening it a few years later as a 241-room hotel that kept the clubhouse's name and much of its original fabric.

Why It Works

We chose this hotel because its renovation treated the building's history as material to work with rather than a problem to solve. Roman and Williams and Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture restored roughly 18,000 square feet of ornamental plaster, more than 26,000 square feet of marble and mosaic flooring, and 82 art glass windows, rather than stripping the interiors down to a blank, contemporary shell. The result reads like a building that has quietly evolved for more than a century, which is a harder effect to fake than a lobby built to look old on day one.

Why This Location

The hotel fronts Michigan Avenue directly across from Millennium Park, putting Frank Gehry's music pavilion, the Art Institute, and the Loop's cultural core within a few minutes' walk. It is one of the most central addresses available to a Chicago visitor, equally useful for a morning in the park, an afternoon at the museum, or an evening in the Loop's theater district, without needing a cab or train to reach any of them.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium

• Vibe: clubby, historic, unmistakably Chicago

• Rooms: 241 rooms and suites

• Best For: history and architecture fans, Millennium Park visitors, guests who want a clubby bar scene

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the original 1893 Billiard Room, still fitted with salvaged gymnasium flooring and a pool cue rack

• Dining: Cindy's, the rooftop restaurant and bar named for John Pritzker's mother

• Amenities: a second-floor Lobby Lounge with leaded-glass windows, the restored Cherry Circle Room bar, rooftop terrace

• Attractions: Millennium Park, the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan Avenue, Loop theater district

The Billiard Room and the Cherry Circle Room

The original 1893 Billiard Room survives largely intact, its walls carrying sport-themed chalkboard cartoon sketches alongside salvaged gymnasium flooring and a back bar built around a pool cue rack. It opens into the Cherry Circle Room, added in 1954, with flush oak paneling and tufted leather banquettes that read as a slightly later chapter of the same club rather than a mismatched addition. Together the two rooms function as the hotel's bar and lounge, giving guests a place to drink that predates the hotel itself by more than a century.

A Restoration That Chose Addition Over Erasure

Rather than restore the building to one fixed historical moment or insert an aggressively modern contrast, the renovation team added new layers that read as a continuation of the building's own pattern of expansion, much as earlier owners added a 1906 annex and raised the building to nineteen stories in 1926. The Michigan Avenue entrance canopy was rebuilt from 1890s drawings, original millwork in the Lobby Lounge was removed, refinished, and reinstalled, and period light fixtures were recreated from old photographs rather than replaced with something generic.

Cindy's and a Rooftop View of Millennium Park

Two new floors crown the building: a mechanical level and, above it, a roughly 6,000-square-foot rooftop pavilion in steel and glass, designed to recall the 19th-century train sheds that once stood in the ravine now covered by Millennium Park. Cindy's, the restaurant and bar that occupies the space, is named for John Pritzker's mother and looks directly across Michigan Avenue at Frank Gehry's music pavilion, giving the hotel one of the most specific rooftop views in the city rather than a generic skyline shot.