An Obituary
The Tropics opened on the ground floor of the Hotel Chicagoan at 67 West Madison Street, in the heart of the Loop — a 21-story tower that had gone up in 1937 with 450 rooms carved out of the older Morrison Hotel complex next door.
It was a pre-tiki bar in the literal sense: open by 1940, before the word “tiki” was used as a category descriptor, when the Polynesian-themed bar was still a Hollywood novelty that had only just begun to migrate east. Newspaper ads ran through at least 1950 — palm fronds and rum punches served to Loop office workers and out-of-town salesmen, in an aesthetic the rest of the country wouldn’t go feverish over for another decade.
In 1953 the Hotel Chicagoan was sold to the First National Bank of Chicago. The bank reconnected the building to the old Morrison Hotel and re-absorbed both into a single complex. The Tropics went dark sometime in this stretch — the trail of newspaper ads thins, then stops.
In 1965 the entire complex came down. A 60-story bank tower called One First National Plaza went up on the site in 1969. It’s now the Chase Tower.
A 21-story hotel containing one of Chicago’s earliest Polynesian rooms was torn down to make way for a building three times its height — belonging to the bank that had bought it.
