Marina City

The twin round towers on your right were paid for by janitors and elevator operators. In the late nineteen fifties, a union representing building service workers, worried that downtown Chicago was emptying out as the middle class fled to the suburbs, decided to finance an experiment instead of just watching it happen. The union's own pension fund bankrolled architect Bertrand Goldberg's design for a self contained city within a city: apartments, offices, a theater, a gym, a bowling alley, and a marina for boats right on the Chicago River, all meant to make downtown living irresistible again to families who had already packed up for the suburbs.

Goldberg gave the towers almost no interior right angles at all. Each residential floor is a circle of sixteen wedge shaped apartments radiating out from a central elevator core, which means every single living room and bedroom in the building has its own curved balcony looking out over the city, something no ordinary rectangular apartment tower could offer at the time. When the towers were finished in nineteen sixty four, they were, for a brief moment, simultaneously the tallest residential buildings in the world and the tallest buildings made of reinforced concrete anywhere on the planet, a record that drew architecture students from around the world to come look at them in person. Chicagoans nicknamed them the corncob towers almost immediately, for their stacked, ridged balconies, and the name stuck so completely that most people who live and work in the neighborhood today have never once heard them called anything else, even on a map.