London House, Take #3 – East Wacker Drive, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois, United States

The London Guarantee Building or London Guaranty & Accident Building is a historic 1923 commercial skyscraper whose primary occupant since 2016 is the LondonHouse Chicago Hotel Formerly, for a time named the Stone Container Building, it is located near the Loop in Chicago, and is one of four 1920s skyscrapers that surround the Michigan Avenue Bridge (the others are the Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower and 333 North Michigan Avenue) and is a contributing property to the Michigan-Wacker Historic District. It stands on part of the former site of Fort Dearborn. From 1872 until 1921 the site was home to the a 7-floor structure that housed the business of William M. Hoyt & Co. The Hoyt company was created during the Civil War. Hoyt became a leading grocery wholesaler, with annual sales of close to $1 million by the mid-1870s and nearly $5 million by the early 1890s, when it was among the region’s leading food distributors.

The London Guarantee & Accident Building was designed by Chicago architect Alfred S. Alschuler and completed in 1923 for the London Guarantee & Accident Company, an insurance firm that was then its principal occupant. The top of the building is noted to resemble the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, but it was modeled after the Stockholm Stadshus.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the studios of Chicago’s WLS (AM) radio were located on the fifth floor of the building. For several decades, Paul Harvey performed his daily syndicated radio show from studios on the fourth floor. The building was also famous from the 1950s through the early 1970s for The London House, a famous Chicago jazz nightclub and steakhouse that was located on the west side of the building’s first floor; it had its own entrance on Wacker Drive. It was one of the foremost jazz clubs in the country, once home to such luminaries as Oscar Peterson, Ramsey Lewis, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland, Cannonball Adderley, Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Nancy Wilson, Barbara Carroll, Bobby Short and many others. In the 1980s and 1990s TV show Perfect Strangers, the building's exterior was used as the home of the fictional newspaper Chicago Chronicle.

The London Guarantee & Accident Building was designated a Chicago Landmark on April 16, 1996.