After a Black media empire fell, a photographer explored the extraordinary building it left behind

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

Just four years after the Civil Rights era, Chicago welcomed its first downtown high rise designed by a Black architect for a Black-owned company. For four decades, the Johnson Publishing Company occupied an 11-story tower at 820 S. Michigan Avenue that was a monument to Black culture, sending out millions of copies of Ebony and Jet magazines each year. The company’s founder, publisher John H. Johnson, called it “the miracle on Michigan Avenue” for having been built at all.

The media titan elevated the stories, news and beauty of Black life, and attracted unrivaled cover stars including Grace Jones, Prince, Donna Summer, Michael Jordan, Florence Griffith Joyner and President Barack Obama. But as the company struggled in the 2010s, it sold off its iconic titles to a venture capitalist firm, and major art world institutions and artists acquired its archives, art collection and furnishings in the hopes of preserving its legacy.

The physical building, though emptied out, remained. Housed inside the austere modernist facade by architect John Moutoussamy, the interiors — the work of Palm Springs designers Arthur Elrod and William Raiser — were never renovated or changed. They had painted the walls in colorful chevrons, peacock feathers, and swirling hues of orange, green and purple, and carpeted the floors with equally exuberant patterns.

The office was vacated by 2012, less than a decade after Johnson’s death, and from there the company eventually declared bankruptcy. Inside its former headquarters, which had housed Ebony, Jet and Fashion Fair cosmetics and a cafeteria so popular that stars and public figures often asked for the menu in advance, the guest list quickly dwindled to one: a photographer who, as she put it, became “obsessed” with the empty building and its history and set out to preserve it.

Now, Barbara Karant’s collected images are part of a new book on the Johnson Publishing Company’s legacy, called “820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon.” Through her photographs, archival images, and guest essays on the building’s history, the book reflects on the company as “the heart and soul of Black America,” and shows the tangible loss of a cultural powerhouse.

“I was completely enamored of the environment and the vitality,” Karant explained. “I really felt, despite the fact that the building was empty, that there was a real residual creativity and energy that remained.”

Karant, an architecture and interiors photographer who is based in Chicago, spoke about the project over video along with Joy Bennett, a former senior editor at Ebony. The two experienced the building in entirely different ways. Bennett, the daughter of Ebony executive editor Lerone Bennett Jr. and Jet editor Gloria Bennett, quite literally grew up with the building, first as her parents’ place of work and then as her own from the late ’90s until 2009. Karant only visited the space after it had been sold to Columbia College Chicago, where she taught as an adjunct professor. She visited it some 40 times beginning in 2013, usually in the spring and fall, because it lacked AC during sweltering summers and was only heated enough to keep the pipes from bursting in the winter, she recalled.

Since completing her project, the building, whose exteriors were landmarked, has been redeveloped into residential units, with the only hint of its past the remaining rooftop sign. (Ebony and Jet magazines changed hands multiple times and are still published digitally under the ownership of Eden Bridgeman Sklenar, who currently serves as its CEO).

When it was built, Bennett said, “It was a testament to Mr. Johnson’s faith, and hope, and success. It was a vibrant workspace, unbelievable. I can’t even explain how important it was to Black America.”

Prior to that, the Johnsons ran their business out of a former funeral home that required a white intermediary to purchase it. When Johnson decided he wanted a new headquarters, he grew frustrated with trying to find investors and funded the project himself.

On any given day, Bennett recalled, the staff could encounter Hollywood stars like Jamie Foxx or Elizabeth Taylor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson or the sex therapist Dr. Ruth; her mother would recall stories of Louis Armstrong or Lena Horne walking the same halls. In the book, others share their encounters: Lionel Richie taking the elevator up, or Sidney Poitier signing autographs, or Michael Jackson arriving incognito. After senator Obama became President-elect Obama in 2008, he sat down with Ebony for his first print interview following the historic election.

“The Secret Service locked us down. We couldn’t leave the floor,” Bennett recalled. “It was crazy.”

But before pursuing her journalism career, Bennett gave tours of the building. There was the bustling cafeteria, Fashion Fair’s dressing rooms, the Ebony Test Kitchen, and artworks by Jacob Lawrence and Richard Hunt, not to mention the barbershop, fitness room, and apartment on the executive floor. Upstairs, the bold reds and sharp angles of Johnson’s suite contrasted with the cream and honey softness of his wife Eunice’s office. It was an extension of Johnson himself, and when he died, his casket was laid out in the foyer of the building, Bennett said, with a line down Michigan Avenue to pay respects.

When Bennett cut her teeth at other media companies including Gannett and Crain’s before her homecoming back to the Johnson Publishing Company, she said every other office space she had encountered, by comparison, was “dull and drab.”

“You mean everybody doesn’t have these colorful floors, these textures, the glass and mirrors, and artists and sculptors who do the design?” she remembered thinking.

Karant experienced the same wonder of the space, even once it had been hollowed out. When she photographed the 110,000 square feet of space, she was always alone, and no matter how many times she visited, whenever she returned she’d find something new. As she was making the book and spoke to former employees, she was often asked which floor was her favorite.

“I guess everybody had different favorite floors,” she said. “But my favorite floor was always the floor I was working on.”

Though it’s no longer possible to experience the building the way it was, it can be visited in different ways — through Karant’s book, or the artworks of Lorna Simspson or Theaster Gates, who both turn to the archives of Jet and Ebony in their personal practices. Gates, who now stewards the photographic archives and periodicals of the Johnson Publishing Company, has exhibited it in different forms. Earlier this year, he mounted a permanent public artwork incorporating some of the images of Black life and beauty at the Obama Presidential Center. Through her own project, Karant has joined a group of artists determined to give the Johnson Publishing Company a second life.

“Architecture, interiors, environments tell stories about the people that were there and the people that may be there in the future,” she said. “As far as this project, I felt that it just warranted the attention and the care to document it. People need to know about it.”

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