The Brooks Brothers – No, Not The Suit Guys

In 2010 I trained as a docent at the then Chicago Architecture Foundation, now the Chicago Architecture Center. During the training we learned of the importance of East Coast money, influence and people to the building of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. Among the East Coast influencers were the brothers Peter and Shepherd Brooks of Medford, MA. They were what we call today “trust fund babies.” Among their Boston area peers they styled themselves mere gentlemen farmers. Their story is far more interesting and complex than that simple fiction. That Peter was born in the town where I was born and brought up brought the story closer to home, as did my having graduated from Tufts University in Medford. Here’s my take on the Brooks Brothers, who so affected the burgeoning of the skyscraper office building.

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In 1831, in the section of Watertown, MA that later became the south part of Belmont, Peter Chardon Brooks was born. The child was to become one of the most important historic figures in the development of the skyscraper.

Little is known about his family’s residence in Watertown. Peter Brooks’s grandfather, the original Peter Chardon Brooks (1767-1849), was, at the time of his death, quite possibly the wealthiest man in Boston. His wealth came from a marine insurance business, some of which insured ships involved in the Atlantic slave trade – no surprise, given that the family were slaveholders prior to and after the American Revolution.

The elder Brooks was also the grandfather of the historian Henry Adams and the great-great grandfather of Massachusetts governor and senator Leverett Saltonstall (1892-1979).  Leverett Saltonstall’s mother was Eleanor Brooks, Peter Chardon Brooks’s daughter, providing a bit of interesting insight into the insularity of Boston society. Leverett Saltonstall was also a descendant of Sir Richard Saltonstall of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who founded Watertown.

Peter Chardon Brooks, Jr. and his brother Shepherd invested heavily in Chicago real estate at the beginning of the rise of the skyscraper. They built Chicago’s 1883 Montauk Block (demolished 1902), a very early tall building, 10-stories high, and the first building anywhere to be deemed a “skyscraper.” Historically, another Chicago building, the Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, is considered the first true skyscraper, employing what became the standard method of construction, a fireproof structural steel frame that fully supported the building. The Montauk relied both on its steel structure and on its walls for support, whereas later skyscrapers were supported entirely by their interior steel lattice.

The Brooks brothers (other than wearing them, they had nothing to do with men’s suits) spent most of their lives in Medford on what is now the Brooks Estate. Their friends and associates in Massachusetts knew nothing of their extensive investments in Chicago. Their reputations were those of “gentlemen farmers.”

The brothers, mostly Peter, worked extensively with Owen Aldis, a Chicago developer, and with the architecture firms Burnham and Root and Holabird and Roche, two of the most important 19^th century tall building design firms. Peter was very involved in the details of his buildings and depended upon Aldis both to innovate with him and to manage the process. They together adhered to several development principles:

• The office building with the most light is the best investment.
• Second-class space costs as much to operate as first-class space; therefore, build no second-class space.
• Common areas should make a lasting impression.
• Operating expenses must always be kept in mind.
• Upkeep is important; it should be management progressive.

In 1895 they completed construction of the Marquette Building, a Chicago landmark and current home of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In keeping with having common areas “make a lasting impression,” the revolving doors and lobby are adorned with relief sculptures.

The lobby ceiling of the Marquette building contains a spectacular encircling mosaic that depicts the 1674-5 expedition of Quebec explorers Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet to the swampland that later became Chicago. The shimmering mosaic, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his art director, Jacob Adolph Holzer, is one of several large Tiffany works in the city but is the first such high-class decoration in an office building in the city.

Peter was very detail-oriented (his brother Shepherd was not). According to Joyce Goldenstern in her “Monadnock on the Prairie,” for Peter (whose visits to Chicago were brief and infrequent):

“Nothing was too minute for his scrutiny: paint color, faucets, urinals, plumbing, and elevators invited his long-distance comments and commands. He is said to have in his study a grid-map of downtown Chicago, dotted with colored pins on which he studied the patterns of speculative office space. Like a chess master, he anticipated his competitors’ moves and plotted his own. He knew each block, each corner lot and its potential by heart.” ¹

Elevators were a means to an end: they carried people to those prestigious floors at the tops of buildings – so much so that the Marquette Building – remember, this is 1895 – has seven of them! Also keep in mind that not too long before Marquette opened, people did not trust elevators; they would gladly put supplies and equipment on them, but not themselves. Elevators were, for Peter Brooks, a key element in his ideas about classy buildings.

Owen Aldis apparently cajoled Peter Brooks to add multiple amenities to the Marquette Building. Brooks was well known for his disdain for building art and decorative flourishes. He famously directed that the first half of the 1891 Monadnock Building be thoroughly unadorned. Architect John Wellborn Root, an artist at heart, had, a few years earlier, gotten away with all sorts of whimsical decoration on another Brooks project, The Rookery. It’s not clear what Peter Brooks thought of those fillips, but he was very careful to instruct Root on what to include in and on the Monadnock Building, a very speculative office structure at the time. So Aldis’s Marquette design ideas are all the more remarkable. The Marquette was, and remains, a unique, classy and artistically designed office building.

Surprisingly, to this day, the deception of the Brooks brothers, the quiet fiction that they were just your ordinary well-to-do farmers, persists in Massachusetts. According to Joyce Goldenstern:

“Before he died, Peter, the grandson, told the historian of his Harvard class that he had never worked, that he had no profession. Poor health, he noted, had prevented him from pursuing a career. Whether motivated by modesty or mockery, Peter’s words did not coordinate perfectly with the facts of his life. He, along with Shepherd, had, indeed, worked. They lived the quotidian life of New England farmers, tending to crops and cows, mending stone walls and walkways. In addition, both men, from afar, invested in the development of the burgeoning frontier city of Chicago. They bought land, planned and paid for office buildings, and collected rent.”¹

Four of the buildings that the Brooks brothers financed and leased remain standing today: The Rookery (the main lobby of which Frank Lloyd Wright redesigned), the Monadnock, the Marquette and the Brooks Building. The Monadnock was built in two stages. The north half is a 19-story brick building mostly supported by its brick walls, designed by John Wellborn Root of Burnham and Root and completed in 1891; the south half, a steel-framed structure attached to the original building, was designed by Holabird and Roche and completed in 1893. Root had died by the time Brooks and Aldis decided to add the second section and Burnham’s surviving firm was unavailable, since Burnham and his team were designing the buildings of the Columbian Exposition. The original plan of the building was to divide it into four 100-foot sections, each to be operated independently. Each of those sections was to be named after mountains in New England: Monadnock, Kearsarge, Katahdin and Wachusett. Today the building is managed as a single entity.

Peter’s vision and foresight with respect to Chicago’s tall buildings of the time not only made him a lot of money, they also put him in rare company: the true innovators and mavens of our contemporary world. But his story remains buried and mostly unremarked upon in his own home state. And (a very small bit of borrowed glory here) he was born in Belmont.

1. Goldenstern, Joyce, “Monadnock on the Prairie,” The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review, Issue 5, Winter 2014 (https://themuseumofamericana.net/issues/1894-2/prose/monadnock-on-the-prairie-nonfiction-by-joyce-goldenstern/)

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©November 2025
Edmund J. McDevitt