New Barnes & Noble Opens in Wicker Park's Historic Noel State Bank Building

Obtuse landmark transparency

Late last week marked the grand opening of the long-awaited Barnes & Noble in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago in the Noel State Bank Building. Here are photos:

As usual these are Creative Commons-licensed photos that are free for anyone to use, with attribution.

I’ve been a student of this building for a long time, since I moved into the Bucktown neighborhood in 1985. I wrote a pretty comprehensive post about the building when the Walgreens moved in there (New Walgreens in the Old Noel State Bank Building at 1601 N. Milwaukee), specifically mapping the major architectural details of this property against the landmark permit that approved the work during the renovation and on opening day in 2012. 

Here’s the founding document for this and other nearby buildings to be covered as landmarks of the Milwaukee Avenue Landmark District. It’s a fascinating document with details on lots of buildings. Did you know that the former Fluevog shoes was a movie theater?

There were eight specific conditions that Walgreens had to comply with in order to occupy the historic building. The one I found most interesting was the idea of “transparency and views into the building”-- is fascinating in the context of a bank building that was built in 1920 and collapsed in the Great Depression and then housed Midwest Bank, which collapsed in 2010 (see the Federal Reserve report on what went down there). The idea of being able to physically see inside a building that used to be a bank is considered historically important.

Bottom line is that you can now buy books where people used to rent money. There are no clear views into the building— they are obscured with shelving.

Also: don’t bother trying to get to the basement vault— the entire downstairs is used for offices and closed to the public.

Barnes & Noble passed on the opportunity to turn the Vitamin Vault into a Poetry Palace.