Germania Club Building

Address: 100-114 West Germania Place / 1538-1542 North Clark Street Year Built: 1889 Architect: Addison and Fiedler Date Designated a Chicago Landmark: January 13, 2011

The grandly-scaled Germania Club Building is one of Chicago's best-remaining examples of a once-popular building type: the neighborhood club. The design combines stylistic features of the Romanesque Revival style, with its round-arched window openings and thick-masonry walls, as well as the Classical Revival style, exemplified by the pedimented windows, projecting cornice, and columned entrance portico. On the interior, the building features grand historic spaces, including a double-height ballroom and a large dining room. The club traces its roots back to a men's chorus made up of German-American Civil War veterans who sang at President Lincoln's funeral ceremonies in Chicago in 1865. From the Germania Club Building's completion in 1889 through much of the twentieth century, the building served as a focal point for Chicago's German-American community, the city's most populous ethnic group at the turn of the last century.