Chicago Athletic Association Hotel - Inside The Golden Age Playground Chicago Almost Lost

For 114 years, the only way through these doors was as a member – and only if you were male, wealthy, and vouched for by someone already inside. Today anyone can walk into the Chicago Athletic Association, order a drink in a room where Prohibition-era police once looked the other way, and sleep a few floors above where a five-time Olympic swimming champion who went on to play Tarzan in Hollywood used to train.

The building opened in 1893 across Michigan Avenue from what is now Millennium Park, modeled on the Doge's Palace in Venice. It stayed a private club for well over a century, sat closed for years, and reopened in 2015 as a 240-room hotel that has since picked up a Key in the MICHELIN Guide. A surprising amount of what made it a club – the pool, the basketball court, the room where members bent the rules during Prohibition – is still there, just repurposed.

Right Across From Millennium Park

The hotel sits at 12 South Michigan Avenue in the Loop, directly across the street from Millennium Park – close enough that Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture, known locally as The Bean, is visible from several upper-floor rooms.

The Crown Fountain and the Pritzker Music Pavilion are right there too, the Art Institute of Chicago is a short walk south, and Lake Michigan is close enough to reach on foot. The Chicago Symphony Center and the city's Theater District are only a few minutes away as well. It puts you inside Chicago's cultural core without much need to plan around it.

From A Men's Club To A Hotel

The Chicago Athletic Association started as a club, not a hotel. A group of Chicago businessmen and sports enthusiasts founded it in 1890, and its clubhouse on Michigan Avenue opened in 1893, in time for the World's Columbian Exposition, at a cost of about $800,000 – roughly $21 million in today's money.

Architect Henry Ives Cobb designed the building in the Venetian Gothic style, with a facade – largely the work of his assistant, Louis Christian Mullgardt – modeled on the Doge's Palace in Venice, ogive windows and Moorish detailing included.

Membership was exclusive and, for a long time, all male. Early members included William Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs and borrowed the club's red-circled letter C for the team's logo in 1917; department store owner Marshall Field; and Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World's Fair.

Johnny Weissmuller, the five-time Olympic gold medalist who later played Tarzan on screen, trained in the club's pool, as did Theodore Roosevelt during a reunion of his Rough Riders. Not everyone got in: Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey applied repeatedly and was turned down every time.

The club fielded teams in swimming, water polo, track, baseball, and gymnastics, and for a few seasons in the 1890s it ran a football team built from former University Club players. In 1893, during the World's Fair, that team played West Point in one of the earliest night games in the sport's history, winning 14–0 in a shortened 40-minute match.

Though officially amateur, the club was dogged by accusations of paying its players; sportswriter Caspar Whitney of Harper's Weekly alleged it paid center Archibald Stevenson $600 to play the 1895 season. Blues musician Muddy Waters performed here, and so, on piano, did Duke Ellington.

Women weren't admitted as members until 1972, and the club stayed private until it closed in 2007, the same year it landed on Chicago's list of endangered buildings. The Pritzker family, who also own the Hyatt hotel chain, bought the building and spent years on a restoration led by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, recovering roughly 1,672 m² (18,000 sq ft) of decorative plaster and close to 2,973 m² (32,000 sq ft) of historic wall paneling and relief work, including the White City Ballroom's ornate plaster ceiling.

Roman and Williams handled the interiors, and the hotel – part of The Unbound Collection by Hyatt – opened in 2015. It earned a Key in the 2025 MICHELIN Guide.

Several of the club's old spaces survive in new forms. The swimming pool where Weissmuller trained, once known to members as the Tank, is now an event space with its original mosaic tile floor intact, lane markers and "Shallow" and "Deep" signage still visible.

The fourth-floor gymnasium and basketball court, named Stagg Court after longtime University of Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, keeps its original floorboards, hoops, and encircling running track, and now hosts roller-skating classes rather than pickup games.

Off the lobby, the Milk Room once served alcohol to members during Prohibition. And on the ground floor, Chicago's first Topgolf Swing Suite gives the building's sporting streak an entirely different kind of second life.

The Drawing Room - Once The Club's Library

The Drawing Room occupies the second floor and works as the hotel's lobby, though it looks and feels more like the reading room of an old private club than a check-in desk. Three fireplaces with detailed relief work, quarter-oak millwork, and terrazzo floors carry over from the building's original design, alongside wooden columns, work tables, and reading nooks facing the lake.

Unlike most hotel lobbies, it's built to be lingered in – people come for coffee and morning emails, then come back in the evening for a cocktail. The food and drink menu leans into regional classics kept fairly simple, backed by a full coffee and cocktail program.

The Game Room

The Game Room was the club's original billiards room, and it still centers on a good game – just with more options now.

Under a coffered ceiling dating to the turn of the twentieth century, you'll find billiards, shuffleboard, chess, checkers, pop-a-shot, and skeeball, alongside a bar built around cocktails and pub food.

The Ives, A Supper Club Built On The Building's Old Grill Room

The Ives takes its cues from the building's history as a private dining room, reworked by Chef Partner Chris Pandel and the Boka Restaurant Group into what the hotel describes as a modern supper club. The menu is nostalgic without being a straight throwback, and the service leans into old-school touches – circulating carts, tableside preparation – that give the room a sense of occasion.

Midōsuji, An Eight-Seat Handroll Bar

Midōsuji is a small, chef-facing handroll bar on the second floor of the hotel, seating eight people at a time. Chef Partner Brian Lockwood, an alum of Eleven Madison Park, runs a menu of made-to-order handrolls and seasonal small plates alongside a cocktail, wine, and sake list, pairing dishes like a caviar-flecked cauliflower chawanmushi with a Jonah crab salad built around horseradish, miso, and melon.

The name and design reference Midōsuji Avenue in Osaka, drawing a line between that ginkgo-lined boulevard and Michigan Avenue's own Magnificent Mile.

Cindy's, The Rooftop Named For A Pritzker

Cindy's sits on the hotel's 13th floor under a glass atrium, with a year-round open-air terrace looking out over Millennium Park and Lake Michigan. The kitchen, led by former Top Chef contestant Kaleena Bliss, works with local, wild, and seasonal produce with an emphasis on seafood – Island Creek oysters and braised short rib both appear on the menu – alongside a cocktail list that includes the tequila-based Jalisco Haze, plus biodynamic wines and spirit-free cocktails.

The restaurant is named for Cindy Pritzker, matriarch of the family that bought and restored the building, and an Andy Warhol portrait of her from 1982 hangs in the private dining room.

The Rooms And Suites

All 240 rooms and suites were designed by Roman and Williams around the building's athletic-club history, worked into small physical details rather than an overt theme. Headboards echo the shape of vintage brass beds, blankets come from the Faribault Woolen Mill Company, some benches are shaped like pommel horses, table legs are wrapped like old racquet handles, and desks have crisscrossed backs that reference historic stretching walls.

Bathrooms are finished in Carrara marble, and the robes follow a boxing-style cut rather than the usual waffle weave. A handful of rooms, including three named Founders Rooms (numbers 328, 330, and 331), keep individual historic features – one has a small library and intricate woodwork, one a free-standing wrought-iron tub overlooking Millennium Park, and one a working fireplace with original stained glass.

Room sizes vary widely, from standard king and queen rooms around 20–24 m² (220–260 sq ft) up to suites well over 90 m² (1,000 sq ft). The Junior Suite with a Millennium Park view runs to about 47.8 m² (515 sq ft), the two-bedroom Millennium King Suite to roughly 93.4 m² (1,005 sq ft), and the two-level Bi-Level Suite, which sleeps up to six across one king and two double beds, to about 102.2 m² (1,100 sq ft).

The Founders Suite

The Founders Suite is the largest and most detailed of the hotel's rooms, at about 80.5 m² (867 sq ft). It has two working fireplaces, French doors opening toward Michigan Avenue, and original stained-glass windows, alongside a separate seating area and an oversized bathroom.

Much of the original woodworking throughout the room has been kept rather than reproduced, and the suite looks out over Millennium Park below. Of everywhere in the hotel, it holds onto the most of what the building looked like when it was still a private club.