Martin A. Ryerson
American, lawyer, businessman, philanthropist and art collector
1856 CE to 1932 CE
Martin A. Ryerson (1856-1932) is an American, lawyer, businessman, philanthropist and art collector.
Heir to a considerable fortune, he is a lumber manufacturer and corporate director.
He becomes the richest man in Chicago by the age of thirty-six.
A long-time trustee of the University of Chicago, he makes large charitable contributions for the construction of buildings on campus.
He bequeathes his extensive art collection to the Art Institute of Chicago.
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The team of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan completes the gorgeously ornamented, near perfectly acoustically designed Auditorium Building in 1889.
The building, which when constructed is the largest in the United States and the tallest in Chicago, is designed to be a multi-use complex, including offices, a theater, and a hotel.
Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago businessman, had incorporated the Chicago Auditorium Association in December 1886 to develop what he wanted to be the world's largest, grandest, most expensive theater that would rival such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
He is said to have wanted to make high culture accessible to the working classes of Chicago.
The building was to include an office block and a first class hotel.
Peck had persuaded many Chicago business tycoons to go on board with him, including Marshall Field, Edson Keith, Martin A. Ryerson, Charles L. Hutchinson and George Pullman.
The association had hired the renowned architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan to design the building.
At the time, a young Frank Lloyd Wright is employed at the firm as draftsman, and he may have contributed to the interior design.
The University of Chicago is incorporated as a coeducational institution in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society, using $400,000 donated to the ABES to match a $600,000 donation from Baptist oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, and including land donated by Marshall Field.
While the Rockefeller donation provides money for academic operations and long-term endowment, it is stipulated that such money cannot be used for buildings.
The Hyde Park campus is financed by donations from wealthy Chicagoans like Silas B. Cobb, who provides the funds for the campus' first building, Cobb Lecture Hall, and matches Marshall Field's pledge of $100,000.
Other early benefactors include businessmen Charles L. Hutchinson (trustee, treasurer and donor of Hutchinson Commons), Martin A. Ryerson (president of the board of trustees and donor of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory) Adolphus Clay Bartlett and Leon Mandel, who fund the construction of the gymnasium and assembly hall, and George C. Walker of the Walker Museum, a relative of Cobb who encourages his inaugural donation for facilities.