A downtown Chicago building — meant to be temporary when completed 127 years ago — remains standing, but recent indications suggest it might not stand much longer.

The Yukon building is a two-story structure built in 1898 by the Boston-based real estate investor who also put up the Rookery , the Monadnock and the Marquette in Chicago. The family that’s owned the Yukon for more than half a century put it up for sale. Now, the property taxes are delinquent and at least three tenants have vacated their spaces in recent months.

John Bakovich said his family is trying to get the empty spaces rented so they can pay their tax bill. However, the primary goal “is to sell it.”

The low-rise building has no landmark status that would prevent demolition, and Bakovich said a new owner most likely “is going to have to develop it,” meaning build something taller on the site.

It’s easy to overlook the Yukon, on the southwest corner of Clark and Van Buren streets, because it’s overshadowed by the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the triangle-shaped high-rise jail built in 1975.

But from one particular vantage point (two stories up, on the exit stairs from the elevated CTA stop at LaSalle and Van Buren), you can see its story unfold. At the top is an elaborate cornice, with carved corbels and other orders of detail stretching from the corner along the facades on Clark and Van Buren. Below that, some frilly ornamentation hugs the building’s corner, and within the layers of cracked paint sits the letter Y, for Yukon, in each of four circles.

The top of the Yukon building features a cornice, with carved corbels and other details that stretch from the corner along the facades.

Below that is something difficult to take in from sidewalk level, thanks to the cacophony of storefront signs: the long bands of windows that run from the corner along the Clark and Van Buren facades. Those windows were quite a modern move in 1898; at the time, The Chicago Tribune wrote the building would be “unique in construction,” built “principally of plate glass, giving good light for the interior.”

From that perch on the L steps, you can also see just how empty the second floor is. Bakovich said the primary tenant moved out overnight without notice sometime in the past several months. He said his family is trying to get new tenants for the Clark Street restaurant space once home to Cocina, a Mexican restaurant, and the Van Buren space of his family’s former restaurant, Boni Vino, from 1967 to last year.

The owners of The Yukon building are trying to find tenants for the former Boni Vino space.

Some tenants remain, including Americana Submarine, the Vivian Ellen hair color salon and the legendary dive bar Sky-Ride Tap .

The Sky-Ride Tap is one of as few businesses left in the Yukon building at 400 S. Clark St.

But even if they get all the space rented again, Bakovich said, “it’s not enough to cover the taxes.”

According to the Cook County Treasurer, the property taxes on the building for 2023 (billed in 2024) were a smidge over $210,000. The 2024 taxes, billed this year, will be at least 8% more. The 2023 taxes haven’t been paid, according to the treasurer, and neither were the 2022 taxes, which were sold in the county’s delinquent tax sale. Under the delinquent tax sale system, the buyer of those taxes could, over the course of a few years, take ownership of the property — that is, if somebody doesn’t buy the building outright first.

There’s a huge historical irony to the Yukon’s current tax situation, since it was originally built as what was known as a “taxpayer building.” Tim Samuelson, who retired as Chicago’s cultural historian in 2020, said these were “built inexpensively to generate just enough income to cover real estate taxes and expenses, until the time when the real estate value of an area improved to merit its replacement with a permanent, substantial building.”

Bostonian Peter Brooks invested heavily in Chicago real estate during the rebuilding effort after the 1871 fire. He bought the L-shaped site at Clark and Van Buren in December 1884 for $175,000, according to historical Chicago Tribune articles. That’s the equivalent of paying $5.67 million today.

Brooks, who sometimes partnered with his brother Shepherd, had already built two Chicago highrises, the Portland and Montauk buildings, neither of which is still standing. Brooks would build at least five more highrises: the aforementioned Rookery, Monadnock and Marquette , as well as the Tacoma, which is gone, and the Brooks, extant on Jackson Street and given the developer’s name when he was 87 years old.

Brooks wasn’t the first to envision a highrise for the Clark and Van Buren site: The man who sold him the site, S.A. Kent, once announced plans to build something “that would compare favorably with the tall office buildings that now grace LaSalle Street,” the Chicago Tribune reported at the time of the sale.

The Brooks brothers “saw the new phenomenon known as skyscrapers as a good way to invest their money,” Samuelson said.

In the mid-1880s, the Brooks brothers planned skyscrapers in the south area of downtown Chicago. These were to house a steady stream of tenants from the financial community around the Board of Trade, which opened at Jackson and LaSalle in 1885 in a building later replaced by today’s 1920s edifice.

In 1885, the Brooks brothers announced plans for a 12-story tower on the Clark and Van Buren site; it would have had a skylit atrium, like their Rookery, which they were building at the time. Thirteen years later, the brothers announced a shorter, six-story plan for Clark and Van Buren. A few months after that, they said they’d build just two stories. The site had become a “taxpayer,” something to keep revenue coming while they waited to put a tall building there.

The brothers tapped the architecture firm Holabird & Roche to design the Yukon. An important firm in the history of Chicago skyscrapers, its previous work for Brooks was the later south portion of the Monadnock and the Marquette. They were innovators in the field of skyscrapers, but here, they were building smaller. They were also working for a tight-fisted client .

The Yukon building still has the sign for the now-closed La Cocina resturant.

In a 1980 landmark nomination for a different Brooks building, the city’s department of planning and development described Peter Brooks as “want[ing] utilitarian structures that cost as little as possible.” It suggested his budget-consciousness might have driven architects to make some of the choices that now characterize historical Chicago skyscrapers.

At the Yukon, because they didn’t need a bulky frame to support a tall building, Holabird & Roche “reduced framing to a bare minimum, opening the entire building for maximum glass,” Samuelson said. “It pushed their experiments in glass to the extreme, making it one of their most striking buildings on the path to glass-filled, structurally expressive modernism.”

The glassiness is still there 127 years later, but it could soon be gone if a new owner — following two from the 19th century that never materialized — proposes a high-rise for the site.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago .