A captivating new book offers a look inside the 'astonishing' Chicago headquarters of Ebony and Jet magazines

When John H Johnson opened the South Loop, Chicago, headquarters of his publishing company in 1972, he called the new home of magazines like Ebony and Jet, among his other ventures, 'the miracle on Michigan Avenue.'

The 11-story building clad in bands of walnut travertine alternating with ribbons of tinted glass was the first downtown tower commissioned by a Black-owned company and became a universe unto itself. Its interiors – furnished wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling in explosive patterns, rich textures and modernist furniture – symbolised the dynamic expressions of Black life Johnson depicted across his media empire.

For nearly four decades, that architectural vision at 820 S Michigan Avenue remained virtually unchanged. Then, in 2010, the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) had to sell its headquarters in order to cut costs and help stay afloat during a collapsing ad market. What was once the epicenter of Black media would soon become vacant, which sparked last-ditch actions from preservationists, artists, historians and more to document and save what they could from the building.

820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, a new book by the photographer Barbara Karant, is one such endeavor. It features new and archival photos of the building along with a foreword by Deborah Willis and essays by Cheryl Finley, E James West and Carla Williams, among others.

As soon as JPC left the building, Karant (who was teaching at Columbia College Chicago, which purchased the building) toured it. 'I was completely blown away,' she recalls. 'The interiors were so dynamic and lively and graphic and colourful.'

From 2013 until the building’s conversion to luxury residential units in 2017, Karant periodically documented every floor inside of the vacant building, photographing for six to eight hours straight when she came.

'I felt like it needed to be retained for posterity's sake, for historical purposes and cultural purposes,' Karant says. 'The vibrancy that still remained in this space was very compelling and intriguing to me. So I felt like I needed to set up some kind of project to document this interior before it disappeared.'

Karant's images aren’t time capsules. Rather, her frames of empty rooms picked clean serve as a post post-occupancy report, one final look at the center of gravity that was. The sun-bleached wallcoverings, delaminated veneers and scuffed furniture across the photographs depict decades of use. There is, of course, solemnity in seeing what is essentially the corpse of a culturally significant institution. But the fact that the headquarters’ interiors still looked so distinctive in the twilight of their life is still remarkable. Aging is its own kind of honour.

'I never really felt like it was abandoned because there was so much of the spirit of the company in the building,' Karant says. 'From the beginning, it was such a statement for JPC. It was deliberate and it empowered the company and everybody loved it. People were so committed to it that I think that's why everything may have stayed the same for the duration that it did.'

In 1969, Johnson hired John Warren Moutoussamy – a pupil of Mies van der Rohe at IIT and the first Black architect to become a partner in a major Chicago firm – to design its new headquarters. While glistening curtain-wall high rises defined the new downtown skyline, Johnson sought something different. As E James West writes in an essay in the book, 'it had to be Black. Black architect. Black enterprise. Black aesthetic.' Moutoussamy delivered a sophisticated tower whose mass imparted presence and staying power.

Eunice Johnson, the fashion director of Ebony and Johnson’s wife, oversaw the interiors and worked closely with Arthur Elrod and William Raiser on them. The Palm Springs – based designers gave each floor its own maximalist identity. To wit: The lobby was clad in panels of bronze and Mozambique wood and featured a monumental bronze sculpture by Richard Hunt along with red leather banquettes. The reception area of the ninth floor, which housed executive offices, featured a sculptural bronze-toned resin screen, a coffee table made of Mexican onyx, and an earth-toned checkerboard carpet. Some wallcoverings were stylized like peacock feathers and the famous Ebony test kitchen was enveloped in psychedelic, marbled laminate. Eunice’s own office, on the seventh floor, was adorned monochromatically in cream tones, with Space Age executive chairs, Italian lamps and African antiques.

JPC stuck to its aesthetic for the entirety of its tenure in the building. 'The idea that a corporation was so committed to a brand that was presented in their environment that they never renovated,' Karant says. 'They might have retrofitted or fixed things, but they didn't change it. I mean, it's pretty astonishing.'

One of her favorite design moments is a room with leopard-print carpeting that extends up the walls. 'It covers a fire extinguisher and the fire closet,' she says.

After JPC moved out, the building’s future became uncertain. It eventually received designation as a national landmark in 2017, sparing it from demolition; however its interiors were not protected, as is often the case with historic buildings. Rescue missions ensued. Its photo archives went to the Getty Research Center and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Landmarks Illinois  managed to excise the Ebony test kitchen, which the NMAAHC acquired in 2023 for its permanent collection. With the blessing of Linda Johnson Rice, John Johnson’s daughter, the artist Theaster Gates retrieved over 15,000 objects from the space – 'anything movable,' he said. This included artwork, furniture, books, ephemera and fragments of its interior finishes, like wallpaper and carpet. 'So much was built into the architecture that you had to take large pieces of wall with you just to remove some things,' Gates recalled. 'You had to choose the cut to save the body.'

Evidence of this shows up in Karant’s photos, too. The building was not quite a shell, but it had been picked over. 'What's left behind is kind of always a bit of interest because it tells a story about what came before and it tells a story maybe about what's going to come afterwards,' she says.

And what comes afterward is, in some ways, still unfolding. In 2017, Columbia College College Chicago sold the building to developers who converted it into luxury condos. None of the JPC interiors remain, but the way they shaped the thousands of people who came through them and what their memory might yield remains to be seen. The daringness of JPC to create a corporate headquarters that was fully in its style remains peerless.

Karant hopes the ambition still serves as an inspiration. 'There was a residual message left in their departure,' she says, noting that she hopes the book offers a way to remember and appreciate everything the Johnson Publishing Company achieved.