Just four years after the Civil Rights era, Chicago welcomed its first downtown high rise designed by a Black architect for a Black-owned company. For four decades, the Johnson Publishing Company occupied an 11-story tower at 820 S. Michigan Avenue that was a monument to Black culture, sending out millions of copies of Ebony and Jet magazines each year. The company’s founder, publisher John H. Johnson, called it “the miracle on Michigan Avenue” for having been built at all.
After a Black media empire fell, a photographer explored the extraordinary building left behind | CNN
The Johnson Publishing Company commissioned a historic high rise in Chicago in 1972 that became a monument to Black culture. Four decades later, the photographer Barbara Karant explored the empty building it left behind.
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