Many years ago a college friend who was one of the lucky ones—right out of J-school she got a reporting job with the Chicago Tribune—led me up a public elevator to a little-known service elevator and out onto a terrace at the top of a hotel that’s now the InterContinental. It was a summer night. Stars lit the sky above and glittering Michigan Avenue below. And at our exalted level, almost near enough to touch, loomed the Tribune Tower’s mighty gothic crown.
And what about the various artifacts embedded in the building’s facade—the stones from the Alamo and Notre Dame cathedral and the Great Wall of China? The ordinance doesn’t mention them either. The problem is that these adornments aren’t so much site specific as Tribune specific, reflecting the idealism and venturesomeness of journalism, and the eccentricity of the colonel. Should they stay where they are—to grace, completely gratuitously, the entrance to an LA-based real estate company’s property? Should the Tribune, the departing main tenant, be allowed to take its relics to its next headquarters? (My guess is the Tribune has little interest in doing this and its next landlord will have even less.)
Chicago will still have the Tower—by one name or another—but when will a building have been more gutted?
