The
Chicago Temple Building is a 173 meter (568 foot)
tall skyscraper church located in Chicago
, Illinois
, United States
. It is home to the congregation of the First United
Methodist Church of Chicago
. It was completed in 1924 and has 23 floors
dedicated to
religious and
office use.
It is the tallest church "building" in the
World, though not the tallest church in the world (see Ulm Cathedral
). It was designed by
Holabird & Roche.
It was the
tallest building in Chicago from 1924 until 1930 when it was
surpassed by the Chicago Board of Trade Building
. This claim counts its steeple to maintain superiority over
the 1927 35 East
Wacker
Building.
The building consists of masonry and
steel and
is designed in the
neo-gothic
architectural style.
There are three sanctuaries in the building:
- Sanctuary 1 is 2 stories tall on the ground floor with seating
available for 1,200 people.
- Sanctuary 2 is also known as the "Dixon Chapel" and is on the
2nd floor.
- Sanctuary 3 also known as the "Sky Chapel" is the smallest
sanctuary and is situated below the steeple with seating for 30
people.
The Sky Chapel was installed in 1952 as a gift from Myrtle Walgreen
in memory of her husband who founded
the chain
of drugstores under their surname.
There is one residential area which is used by the Methodist
church's senior pastor as a
parsonage. On
the 6th floor of the building was the office of
Clarence Darrow, the famous trial
attorney.
Adjacent to the Chicago Temple Building, in Brunswick Plaza, is a
large, mixed media sculpture known as
MirĂ³'s Chicago.
A fictionalized version of the building is one of the settings in
Charles Merrill Smith's
Father Randollph detective series, where the title
character is the senior pastor resident in the skyscraper's
parsonage.
Notes
External links