Building file · Printers Row
The 1883 printing house where Chicago loft living began: the first factory loft in the city converted to residential condominiums, in 1979.
The Donohue Building was the first large printing factory on what became Printing House Row, built in 1883 to Julius Speyer's Romanesque design with a granite-columned entry arch on Dearborn. M.A. Donohue & Co. printed and published here — much of it classic children's literature — until 1971, with a 1913 Annex by Alfred S. Alschuler joining mid-run.
Then it made history twice. In 1979 the Donohue became the first of Chicago's factory lofts converted into residential condominiums — the building that started everything this site covers. The Annex followed in 1986.
The Donohue is Printers Row in miniature: tall timber interiors, deep window bays, ground-floor storefronts on a block that still reads as the 1890s, and details the conversion kept — building accounts point to the vintage birdcage elevator among them. Roughly a hundred homes between the original building and the Annex, steps from Dearborn Station and the Loop. Provenance matters in lofts, and no Chicago building has more of it.
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