The Merchandise Mart

The Merchandise Mart is a commercial building located in downtown Chicago, Illinois. When it was opened in 1930, it was the largest building in the world, with 4 million square feet of floor space. The Art Deco structure is located at the junction of the Chicago River's branches. The building is a leading retailing and wholesale location, hosting 20,000 visitors and tenants per day in the late 2000s.

Built by Marshall Field & Co. and later owned for over half a century by the Kennedy family, the Mart centralized Chicago's wholesale goods business by consolidating architectural and interior design vendors and trades under a single roof. It has since become home to several other enterprises, including the Shops at the Mart, the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Art, Motorola Mobility, the Grainger Technology Group branch of W.W. Grainger, and the Chicago tech startup center 1871. It was sold in January 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust.