The Shillito/Lazarus Building
675 Race Street at 7th;
James W. McLaughlin; 1976-78

The original design for the second John Shillito Co. (later Lazarus) Department Store (now the Shillito Lofts) Building by James W. McLaughlin may well have influenced the early development of the Chicago "skyscraper," according to architectural historian Gerald Larson. Published in 1877, the Shillito building’s exterior design and iron-skeleton structure were known to Chicago architect William LeBaron Jenney (1832-1907), who was connected to a Cincinnati family and visited the city while designing Chicago’s 1879 First Leiter Building, often considered the first "Chicago School" high-rise commercial structure. The austere yet grandly scaled pressed-brick facades of the Shillito Building (now visible only on the south side facing Shillito Place) were the model for Jenney’s Leiter Building elevations.

James W. McLaughlin (1834-1923), Cincinnati’s most innovative native architect, was trained by James K. Wilson (see 4). Practicing here from 1857 to 1912, when he moved East, McLaughlin designed major public buildings - many with novel features - including the powerful Richardsonian Cincinnati Art Museum and Art Academy (1882-87; Eden Park), the former Public Library (1870-71), and the first Cincinnati Zoo buildings, the oldest surviving in this country (1874-75; Avondale).

McLaughlin’s father was a partner of equally innovative merchandiser John Shillito, who established Shillito’s Dry Goods Store in 1830. The son’s first significant architectural work was Shillito’s 1857 "Commercial Palazzo" at 13-15 W. 4th St., which still exists. His work is marked by a bold, even awkward character that distinguishes it from the suaver, more stylistically conventional work of the Hannafords. Just as McLaughlin’s severe second Shillito’s Building exterior (at the left above), with its large proportion of windows and 24-foot-wide spans, previewed the Chicago Commercial Style, so the recently restored octagonal interior atrium reveals a dramatic sense of spatial form, color, and pattern akin to Louis Sullivan’s. Originally the interior, where high-quality American and imported goods were displayed, was a virtual cage of glass and iron, no doubt inspired by fashionable Parisian department stores; in fact, when the new store opened, Cincinnati was acclaimed the "Paris of America."

In 1928 Shillito’s was acquired by the Lazarus family of Federated Department Stores. Most of the exterior of the building was reclad in limestone in a "Mayan" Art Deco manner by Potter Tyler Martin (& Roth) in 1937. It was converted in 1998-99 into loft apartments by Towne Properties. NR. Atrium open by request.