Tribune Tower & The Embedded World Relics: The Gothic Giant

Why is it significant?

Walk right up to the heavy limestone exterior wall of Tribune Tower and run your fingers across the rough stones set into the facade.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk right up to the heavy limestone exterior wall of Tribune Tower and run your fingers across the rough stones set into the facade. You are looking at an architectural museum of world history: eccentric newspaper publisher Colonel Robert McCormick instructed his foreign correspondents to bring back authentic stone fragments from the greatest monuments on Earth. Embedded right at eye level, you can touch fragments from the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, the Roman Colosseum, and even a rock from the Moon!

In nineteen twenty-two, the Chicago Tribune hosted the most famous international architectural competition of the twentieth century to design the most beautiful office building in the world. New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood won with this soaring neo-Gothic skyscraper, crowning its top with thirty-six-foot flying buttresses inspired by Rouen Cathedral in France.

McCormick was so paranoid during the gangster wars that he kept two loaded pistols in his desk drawers and rode through the streets in an armored limousine, fearing ambushes from Capone's North Side rivals.

Walk down the staircase to the Chicago Riverwalk below.