page_title: Marshall Field's
section_title: After the Great Fire
hierarchical_section_title: Marshall Field's / History / After the Great Fire
caption_attribution_description: English: Public domain photo from 1890 Marshall Field's Wholesale Store
context_page_description: Marshall Field's was a department store in Chicago, Illinois, founded in the 19th century that grew to become a large chain before being acquired by Macy's, Inc in 2005.
  The former flagship Marshall Field and Company Building location on State Street in the Loop of downtown Chicago was officially renamed Macy's on State Street in 2006 and is now one of four Macy's flagship stores.
context_section_description: Two years later, in October 1873, Field and Leiter returned to State Street at Washington, opening in a new five-story store at their old location they now leased from the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Palmer having sold the land site to finance his own rebuilding activities. This store was expanded in 1876, only to be destroyed by fire again in November 1877. Ever tenacious, Field and Leiter had a new temporary store opened by the end of the month at a lakefront exposition hall they leased temporarily from the city, located at what is now the site of the present Art Institute of Chicago. Meanwhile, the Singer company had speculatively built a new, even larger, six-story building on the ruins of their old 1873 store, which, after some contention, was personally bought by Field and Leiter. Field, Leiter & Company now reclaimed their traditional location at the northeast corner of State and Washington for the last time in April 1879.
  In January 1881, Field, with the support of his junior partners, bought out Levi Z. Leiter, renaming the business "Marshall Field & Company". As Palmer had before, Leiter retired to tend his significant real estate investments, which included commissioning a department store, Second Leiter Building in 1891 at State Street and Van Buren to house Siegel, Cooper & Company. In 1932, this building (known as one of the earliest steel-framed commercial buildings built and still standing in the U.S. along with the Equitable Building in Baltimore) was leased to the later famous nationwide mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck & Company.
  In 1887, the landmark seven-story Henry Hobson Richardson-designed, (1838–1886), Romanesque-styled, Marshall Field's Wholesale Store opened on Franklin Street between Quincy and Adams (razed c.1930). Though little remembered today, the wholesale division sold merchandise in bulk to smaller merchants throughout the central and western United States and at that time did six times the sales volume of the local retail store. Chicago's location at the nexus of the country's railroads and Great Lakes shipping made it the center of the dry goods wholesaling business by the 1870s, with Field's former partner from before the war, John V. Farwell, Sr., (1825–1908), being his largest rival. It was the scale of the profits generated by the John G. Shedd-led wholesale division during this time that made Marshall Field the richest man in Chicago and one of the richest in the country.
caption: Marshall Field's Wholesale Store at Franklin Street, between Quincy and Adams Streets, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, built 1887, razed c. 1930, view taken around 1890
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