Nickerson House

The Samuel M. Nickerson House, located at 40 East Erie Street in the Near North Side neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, is a Chicago Landmark. It was designed by Edward J. Burling of the firm of Burling and Whitehouse and built for Samuel and Mathilda Nickerson in 1883. Samuel M. Nickerson was a prominent figure in the rising national banking industry, who was said to have owned at one point more national bank stock than anyone else in the United States.

In 1916, in an early act of historic-building preservation, a group of wealthy Chicagoans bought the house and donated it to the American College of Surgeons (ACS). In addition to using the house as its headquarters, ACS built the adjacent classical Murphy Memorial Auditorium for meetings. When the mansion became too small for the ACS, it began renting it out in 1964. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was bought in 2003 by investor and philanthropist Richard Driehaus. It is home to the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, which focuses on architecture of the Gilded Age, the Art Nouveau movement.