Chicago Board of Trade Museum opens to honor city’s trading history

CHICAGO — The infamous floor pits at the Chicago Board of Trade have been largely empty for years. Now visitors get a chance to step back into what was once the heart of trading.

Tuesday was the ribbon cutting for the Chicago Board of Trade Museum, an exhibition designed for people to get a glimpse into the past while preserving such an integral part of Chicago’s history.

Treasured artifacts like grain scales, trading cards and buttons have gone from the vaults of the Chicago Board of Trade to the front lobby.

“This is really to honor the trading community. They played such a large role in the economic development of the city and much of it was kind of opaque to the world,” Gary Stoltz, chief design and development officer of R2 Cos, said.

The new museum is determined to change that by bringing people into what it was like for the ‘open outcry’ traders working the pits. It’s open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is free to enter.

“What hand signals mean, what a future is. We wanted people to come and learn about those things to better honor the legacy of the trading world,” Stoltz said.

Among those at the opening was Chicago Board of Trade legend and longest running Chairman, Patrick Arbor.

“I was very impressed with the exhibit,” Arbor said. “The Board of Trade was a very big economic engine of Chicago. We had almost 4,000 members in this building.”

Some of those personal stories were preserved through audio files that visitors can listen to from original trading floor phones.

“The Board of Trade was founded in 1848 and was the world’s largest until 1998,” Arbor said.

Arbor was there for 34 years of it, rising from an independent trader to Vice Chairman and finally Chairman. He lived through some of the infamous moments in trading history.

“The Russian grain purchase in 1973 and 1974,” he said.

Along with 1987’s Black Monday and Terrible Tuesday, when Arbor helped Chicago pull off a trading miracle.

“The markets everywhere in the world closed, the CME, Options Exchange…and this little market remained open here in Chicago,” Arbor said.

It’s that history that the owners of the building hope to preserve so that even through Chicago’s open outcry and hand signal system has been replaced by silent computers, the voices and stories of Chicago’s traders live on.