The History of Ottawa, IL’s Carson Building

CLRED is bringing a new tenant into this historic 1961 iconic Carson Pirie Scott department store in downtown Ottawa, IL, joining the Tangled Roots Tasting Room and Rock Paper Scissors. An interesting fact about the building is including in the building’s origins.

John Edwin Scott operated a dry goods store in Ottawa, Illinois. He later moved up to Chicago and became the first partner of Carson and Pirie in the ownership of a dry goods store which became known as Carson Pirie Scott & Co. Two of Scott’s sons, Robert L. and Frederick H., were members of the department store firm.

In 1959, Scott’s original, circa 1868 department store in Ottawa burned down, including the building adjacent to it, later the Woolworth Building. Rebuilding it as a modern, 40,000 SF 3-Level Department store showed how much the department store thought of downtown Ottawa and the founder’s original store.  Since CPS was expanding its iconic State Street Department Store in downtown Chicago at the same time, it brought some of the Louis Sullivan-designed decorative work to Ottawa to commemorate the rebuilding and its connection to the CPS founder, John Scott.  The new CPS in Ottawa is a modern, clean-lined building, but CPS decorated it with metal panels using molds taken from the original State Street flagship store. A plaque on the southern end of the storefront along LaSalle Street in Ottawa commemorates the location as the founder’s store, while the panels connect the location to the rapidly growing business of Carson’s in the Midwest.