The view is west on Lake Street. Before Potter Palmer invested in a stretch of State Street south of Randolph in the 1860s and began to turn it into Chicago’s new central retail shopping area, Lake Street was the city’s major shopping district, though the upper floors of buildings still housed factories and wholesale establishments.
After the fire, the site of Burch's Building, on the southwest corner of Lake and Wabash, was occupied from 1872 to 1899 by the Doane Building, also known as the Franklin MacVeagh & Company Building and the Grocers’ Block. MacVeagh had arrived in Chicago in 1866 and entered the wholesale grocery business before beginning a long career in banking, becoming one of the mainstays of Chicago civic life. He served as Secretary of the Treasury under President William Howard Taft.
