Tribune Tower debuted 100 years ago, ushering in the glory days of the ‘Magnificent Mile'

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

On July 6, 1925, the Tribune opened the doors of Tribune Tower to the public. Perhaps spurred by the paper's hype of its own building, an estimated 20,000 people showed up, a story reported the next day.
'Judges and society matrons, folks from out of town, a mother with a couple of perspiring children dragging at her arms, a sister in her heavy black robes, an old fellow who boasted he'd read the Tribune for 35 years, all these and many more packed themselves into the lobby of the tower and swarmed over every one of its 34 floors,' the Tribune reported.
The newspaper's earlier headquarters were utilitarian structures, the Tribune recalled, 'like the clapboarded two story shanty which stood at the northwest corner of Lake and Clark streets where we were writing and printing the Tribune in one room over neighbor Gray's grocery store — seventy five years ago this summer.'
But Tribune Tower was conceived as a work of art. A totem pole in the form of a skyscraper, its iconography celebrated the greatest newspaper in the fairest city of them all.
Works of architecture are often said to imply something of value. Like, say: 'The tracing over its windows hints at medieval piety.' Tribune Tower spoke loud and clear. Its pedigree was carved into the Indiana limestone of its cladding.
The English poet John Milton's 'Areopagitica' was published in 1644. It's quoted a few feet above the tower's corner stone: 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter and argue freely according to my conscience, above all freedoms.'
'Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that can not be limited without being lost,' Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786. That line appears in the tower's Hall of Inscriptions, along with quotations from Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Euripides and Daniel Webster.
Col. Robert R. McCormick's hymn to newspapering was chiseled into a mantel piece on the 24th floor: 'The newspaper is an institution developed by modern civilization to present the news of the day, to foster commerce and industry, to inform and lead public opinion, and to furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide.'
Tribune Tower's story began in 1922, when management recognized the paper had outgrown its headquarters at Dearborn and Madison streets. The Tribune had won a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst's Herald-Examiner, gaining 250,000 readers.
Joseph Patterson, the paper's other co-owner with McCormick, thought it possible to transform a problem into an opportunity, Katherine Solomonson reports in 'The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition.'
Over lunch with McCormick, Patterson suggested a competition for the design of the new office building.
'Your idea grows on me,' McCormick responded in a memo on January 4, 1922: 'It would surely provoke an enormous amount of comment.'
On June 10, the contest was announced: 'Make for The Tribune a picture of the most beautiful building in the modern world and the prize is won.'
A full-page ad promised a total of $100,000 in prizes. Entrants were asked to 'submit drawings showing the west and south elevations, and perspective from the southwest.'
As insurance against the promotion being a dud, the Tribune gave 10 prominent firms $2,000 to enter. McCormick and Patterson needn't have worried.
Perhaps because architects didn't have to provide detailed blueprints and construction specifications, the contest drew more than 263 entries from 23 countries on three continents.
McCormick was famed for his pessimistic conception of international relations. 'Either we control the destinies of Europe or Europe controls ours,' McCormick said in a 1917 letter to Edward S. Beck, the paper's longtime managing editor.
The tower competition, perhaps not surprisingly, fit into his worldview.
'One gratifying result of this world competition has been to establish the superiority of American design,' the contest's jurors reported. 'Only one foreign design stands out' and 'it did not come from France, Italy, or England, the recognized centers of European, but from the little northern nation of Finland.'
The Finish architect Eliel Sarrinen took second place and won $20,000. His entry missed the August 1 deadline, but the judges decided it was too important to be left out.
Another distinguished architect, Walther Gropius, the head of Germany's famed Bauhaus arts school and heralded as a founding father of modern architecture, finished out of the money.
Another German, Ludwig Hilberseimer, a pioneer of urban planning, drew up a design but didn't enter it. Perhaps he sensed he was bucking the prevailing cultural winds. After World War II, he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
First place and $50,000 was awarded to the New York firm of Howells and Hood for their Gothic revival design. Third place went to a similar design.
Accordingly, Tribune Tower became a medieval cathedral draped over a 20th century steel frame. The latter was a Chicago innovation that could reduce a building's cladding to glass. McCormack spiced his anachronistic melange with bits and pieces of other cultures. Those he could accept in limited doses. He gave his foreign correspondents their marching orders in a memo:
'If you can get stones about six inches square from such buildings as the Law Courts of Dublin, the Parthenon at Athens, St. Sophia Cathedral or any other famous cathedral or palace or ruin–perhaps a piece of one of the pyramids–send them in.'
His man in London replied that his request for a cannonball from an English castle had been turned down by British officials, 'but we acquired it by the process which, I believe, was known in the war as 'winning,'' a euphemism for slipping a guard a few bob to look the other way.
Another correspondent sent a box of rocks from the Holy Land. 'I don't know what size stone David tossed at Goliath,' he explained, 'so I am sending a variety of sizes.'
Whether or not those stones mounted in Tribune Tower's walls are a work of art depends on the eye of the beholder.
Either way, their arrival in Tribune Square, as the property Tribune acquired in 1916 and 1917 was known, was preceded by the construction of a publishing plant. Constructed in front of the plant, Tribune Tower shifted Chicago's center of gravity.
Previously, most commerce and entertainment venues were then south of the Chicago River. But along with the neighboring Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower contributed to the development of the 'Magnificent Mile' — a promotional moniker given the stretch of Michigan Avenue from the river to Oak Street by developer Arthur Rubloff in 1947.
A 29-story women's hotel was built in Streeterville, the neighborhood just east of Michigan Avenue, and the Shriners built the 34-story Medinah Athletic Club just north of Tribune Tower in 1929. It is now the Intercontinental Chicago Hotel.
Over the years, the tower housed branches of Loop luxury-goods retailers, such as Henkel and Best's lighting fixtures, F.W. Monroe Cigar company, and Fanny May candy shops. Kohler rented half of the tower's first floor to exhibit its plumbing fixtures.
In 2018, the Tribune moved out of Tribune Tower, selling it to a developer that converted it into luxury condominiums. And in that form the Tribune Tower will mark its 100th birthday, as it had previous ones, at 435 N. Michigan Ave., thus fulfilling the advice of 19th century British writer and art critic John Ruskin that is preserved in the floor of its lobby.
'When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone.'