Merchandise Mart

The Merchandise Mart (or the Merch Mart, or the Mart) is a commercial building in downtown Chicago, Illinois. When it opened in 1930, it was the world's largest building, with 4 million square feet (372,000 m2) of floor space. The Art Deco structure is at the junction of the Chicago River's branches. The building is a leading retailing and wholesale location, hosting 20,000 visitors and tenants daily in the late 2000s. Built by Marshall Field & Co. and later owned for over half a century by the Kennedy family, the Mart centralizes Chicago's wholesale goods industry by consolidating architectural and interior design vendors and trades under a single roof. It has become home to several other enterprises, including the Shops at the Mart, the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Art, Motorola Mobility, the Grainger Technology Group branch of W.W. Grainger, Conagra Brands, and the Chicago tech startup center 1871. It was sold in January 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust. The Merchandise Mart is so large that it had its own ZIP Code (60654) until 2008, when the Postal Service assigned the ZIP Code to part of the surrounding area. In 2010, the building opened its Design Center showrooms to the public.