• Dearborn Station (1885, NRHP)
• Franklin Building (1916, polychrome terra-cotta tilework)
• Printing House Row National Historic Landmark District (Monadnock, Manhattan, Fisher, Old Colony Buildings)
• M.A. Donohue & Co. Building

Printer's Row traces its identity to the 1885 opening of Dearborn Station, whose rail lines carried raw paper in and finished books, newspapers, and magazines out for the printing houses clustering around it. Publishing in the area actually predates the station — John Calhoun printed the Chicago Democrat, the city's first newspaper, from a nearby shop in 1833 — but Dearborn Station's arrival turned the district into the printing capital of the Midwest. Between 1886 and 1922, more than forty buildings rose in the station's shadow, and the name "Printers Row" first appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1907.

The Franklin Building, completed in 1916, still displays polychrome terra-cotta tilework depicting a bookbinder, a typesetter, and the "first impression" of the Gutenberg Bible. Four of the district's landmarks — the Monadnock, Manhattan, Fisher, and Old Colony Buildings — were designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1976, and the wider neighborhood became a Chicago Landmark in 1996 after decades of decline gave way to loft conversions. Dearborn Station itself, redeveloped as retail and office space in 1986, still anchors the district it helped create.

From a rail depot's printing boom to a landmark loft district, Printer's Row's brick-and-terra-cotta blocks still carry the trade that built them — a history worth wearing on your own shelf of stories.