Home Insurance Building

Home Insurance Building is completed and occupied in Chicago

Every metal column in it was cast iron and only some upper-floor beams were steel, which makes "the first steel skyscraper" a misleading shorthand.

Ten stories at LaSalle and Adams

William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building was completed in 1885 at the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets in Chicago, and the first tenants moved in that autumn.

The original office building had ten stories and stood 138 feet high. Two more floors were added in 1890–1891.

A hybrid, not a skeleton

The structure combined cast-iron columns, wrought-iron members, some steel beams, masonry piers, granite at the lower stories and load-bearing party walls. It was not a modern steel skeleton carrying a wholly non-load-bearing curtain wall.

The Home Insurance Company had commissioned a tall, fire-resistant office building, and Peter B. Wight's terra-cotta system protected the exposed iron members. Recent scholarship cautions against crediting Jenney alone with solving fireproof construction.

"First skyscraper" is contested

Some institutional histories use the label. Recent scholarship emphasises earlier iron-framed buildings, this building's load-bearing masonry, and the promotional campaign that later elevated Jenney's priority claim.

The often-quoted claim that it weighed a third as much as a comparable masonry building is identified in recent peer-reviewed work as inaccurate and poorly founded.

Iron framing had already been used in multistory mills, warehouses and commercial buildings for decades.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

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What the sources leave uncertain

The completion year is secure, but the consulted sources do not establish a single exact completion day.
The label “first skyscraper” is disputed. Some institutional histories use it, while recent scholarship emphasizes earlier iron-framed buildings, the Home Insurance Building’s load-bearing masonry, and the promotional campaign that later elevated Jenney’s priority claim.
Sources vary between 1890 and 1891 for the two-floor addition; a contemporary technical history describes the work as occurring in 1890–1891.