Tribune Tower's Scavenged Stones

Look at the lower stones of the tower ahead, because more than a hundred of them did not come from any Illinois quarry. One hundred forty nine fragments are mortared into the walls near street level, each one labeled with where it came from: a chunk of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a piece of the Parthenon in Athens, stone from the Great Wall of China, from Notre Dame, from castles and ruins in every corner of the globe. Colonel Robert McCormick, who ran the Chicago Tribune, sent his own foreign correspondents out with instructions to bring home a piece of wherever they were reporting from. Over the decades they collected rock from every continent and from sites in all fifty states, some of it carried home in ordinary luggage. After the attacks of September eleventh, two thousand one, a piece of steel salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York was added to the collection, set into the wall alongside stone that is thousands of years old.

The tower itself was the prize in one of the most famous design competitions in American architecture. In nineteen twenty two, the Tribune offered fifty thousand dollars to whoever designed, in the paper's own words, the most beautiful office building in the world. More than two hundred sixty architects entered from around the globe. The winners, John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, answered with a neo Gothic tower modeled loosely on the cathedral at Rouen, completed by the mid nineteen twenties. Hood was in his early forties and nearly unknown before that win; the competition made his career and reshaped the Chicago skyline for a century to come.

So the building ahead is not just a newspaper's old headquarters. It is a scrapbook in limestone and steel, assembled one correspondent's suitcase at a time.