Prairie Avenue Bookshop

I had a chance to visit the Prairie Avenue Bookshop located at 418 South Wabash in the heart of downtown Chicago. It has quite an interesting history stemming back to 1961. Marilyn and Wilbert Hasbrouck founded a quarterly journal, the Prairie School Press. In 1964, they established the Prairie School Review which was devoted to scholarly treatment of American's only indigenous modern architecture. Out of these two publications, the Prairie Avenue Bookshop opened in the Keith House at 1900 Prairie Avenue (pictured above) in 1974. In 1978 the bookstore out grew its lodgings and it moved to South Dearborn street Printer's Row where it too grew in such volume that in 1995 it relocated to its current venue that has six times more space than South Dearborn Street.