Tribune Tower

Colonel Robert R. McCormick announced the competition in June 1922 for the Tribune's seventy-fifth anniversary, and more than 260 entries arrived from 23 countries — Gothic fantasies, Parthenons on pedestals, an Egyptian column offered in literal earnest. The entry that arrived November 29, days before the deadline, was Eliel Saarinen's proto-Deco tower from Finland, which took second place and then went on to influence a decade of American skyscrapers more than the winner did.

First prize, announced December 3, 1922, went to New Yorkers John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood for a neo-Gothic tower crowned with flying buttresses borrowed from the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral. Steel frame in gray Indiana limestone, 36 floors, 463 feet — opened 1925, Chicago Landmark in 1989. Third place, Holabird and Roche, would shortly design the Board of Trade across the canyon.

The runners-up tell the deeper story. Saarinen's second-place design reshaped the decade's skylines; Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer entered a glass-and-steel Bauhaus exercise in Louis Sullivan's own Chicago logic that was ignored at the time and reads now like a preview of 1960. The Tribune published all the entries in a lavish 1923 volume, and the argument over what should have won has never entirely stopped — which may have been the competition's actual deliverable. Hood, for his part, went on to co-design Rockefeller Center.

The embedded stones began arriving with the correspondents who fetched them — pieces of Plymouth Rock, Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln's home, Angkor Wat, St. Peter's, Notre Dame, the Berlin Wall added after it fell, and steel from the World Trade Center after 2001. Each is labeled at street level, which makes the building's base a walkable gazetteer of other people's ruins and shrines — spolia, as the architectural historians file it, deployed as a circulation strategy.

A moon rock NASA sent later could not legally be mortared into the wall and sits instead in display inside. Nathan Hale stands sentinel out front in Bela Lyon Pratt's bronze, placed by McCormick in 1940, motto below.

The Tribune moved out in 2018 and the tower converted to condominiums — the pressroom floor now private address. The haunting file on a newspaper tower is thin by definition, and the register says so plainly: staff accounts of footsteps and after-hours presence in the newsroom floors, nothing that ever reached a photographer.

The better frame is what the building physically is: a Gothic cathedral to journalism containing fragments of actual cathedrals, pyramids, palaces, and one wall's worth of the twentieth century's worst events. If any structure in the file has earned the right to be haunted by places rather than people, this is the one.