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“Too many floors, too few exits, and more deals whispered in shadows than signed in ink. The Mart ain’t a building—it’s a damn machine. And it never stops turning.”

Location: Near North Side (River North)
Established: 1930 – Once the largest building in the world by floor space
Access: Public (select floors), Restricted (upper offices and basement levels)
Connected Factions: The Outfit (business laundering front), Crooked Horn (studies architectural resonance)

Description - Exterior

The Mart squats over the Chicago River like a fortress of commerce, all limestone angles and endless windows. Its massive, symmetrical bulk hums with neon signs, humming elevators, and the slow crawl of money through its veins. At night, the upper windows flicker in strange patterns, and pigeons refuse to roost on the 13th floor ledge.

Description - Interior

Endless corridors of showrooms, freight elevators, polished brass, and echoing tile. The marble floors have grooves worn in unnatural patterns, and some doors—especially in the basements—open into spaces that don’t match the blueprints. Above floor 20, the air gets thinner, colder, and the lights take longer to come on.

Public Face

A retail and design mecca, home to lighting displays, home furnishings, fashion distributors, and business suites. Office workers and designers bustle through polished lobbies while dock workers move crates below. It’s commerce incarnate—modern, bright, and legitimate.

What's Really Going On

The Mart was built with secret rooms and shifting foundations. Some say the lines in its architecture channel resonance—Veil energy aligned with ambition, greed, and entrapment. The Outfit uses it to legitimize shady assets. Crooked Horn scholars claim the building’s scale and design form a massive “sigil of enticement,” drawing opportunity and sacrifice in equal measure. Some believe the basement reaches deeper than the river.

Notables

Frankie Vassallo – Outfit fixer who rents three unlisted offices on separate floors
Eloise Crenshaw – Former department manager, disappeared mid-shift in 1949—elevator arrived empty
Milo Vex – Crooked Horn cartographer who claims the Mart “changes floor plans by mood”
“Mr. Tag” – No one’s seen him, but everyone’s signed something under his name

Rumors & Hooks:

• There’s a freight elevator that only moves at 3:33 AM and only goes down
• A voice sometimes comes over the intercom in an unknown language, only on floor 17
• The basement loading zone includes a locked hatch marked with a Veil brand
• The 21st floor blueprint doesn’t match the real layout—there’s a room that shouldn’t fit
• A cleaning woman says she found a doorknob that turned in both directions—but only when no one watched
• A designer went into a restroom stall and never came out—door was unlocked, lights still on
• A powerful Outfit ledger might be hidden here, encoded in display catalog codes
• The crew could be hired to “fix” a ghost haunting a conference room during presentations
• A crooked architect begs the PCs to help him retrieve a blueprint that was stolen—by the building itself