The Wrigley Building's Grasshopper Scare

The gleaming white tower ahead gets washed by hand, not by machine, its terra cotta tiles still hosed and scrubbed on a rotating schedule nearly a century after they were fired and glazed, because left alone the surface slowly grays with city soot. Floodlights wash it in white light after dark too, a touch the Wrigley family insisted on from the start so the building would glow at night.

It earned a stranger kind of attention in nineteen fifty seven, when a low budget science fiction film called Beginning of the End sent giant mutant grasshoppers rampaging through Chicago, and one special effects shot shows them climbing straight up the Wrigley Building's face, as if drawn to its one architectural high point the way real insects are drawn to a porch light. It remains one of the most quoted scenes in cheap monster movie history, mostly because the building the filmmakers chose to destroy is such a dignified one.

The structure predates the monster movie by more than three decades. Ground was broken in nineteen twenty, the south tower opened in September of nineteen twenty one, and the matching north tower followed by nineteen twenty four, when the two were joined by a covered walkway. It was Chicago's first air conditioned office building, a selling point the Wrigley company advertised heavily to attract tenants willing to pay for cool air through a Chicago summer. The architects, the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, modeled its tiered white tower loosely on the Giralda bell tower of the cathedral in Seville, Spain, dressing a thoroughly modern steel frame in old world ornament.

So the tower ahead carries two very different legacies: one of genuine architectural ambition, and one of giant grasshoppers that never actually existed.