In the walls of Chicago’s Tribune Tower, you can see chunks of the Alamo, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and the Parthenon.
The opening of the Tribune Tower
It’s fair to say that no newspaper these days would dare to open offices as spectacular as the Tribune Tower. In the 1920s, the Chicago Tribune was at the zenith of its powers, and decided to hold a competition to build a new HQ.
The winning design was a piece of staggering chutzpah. Modelled loosely on the Gothic cathedral in Rouen, but turned into a 141 metre skyscraper with art deco hints in the central section, it catches the eye even amongst Chicago’s sea of top drawer high rises.
The newspaper business is no longer a licence to print money, however, and in 2018 the Tribune moved out, with most of the tower being converted into luxury flats.
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Tribune Tower lobby
The new occupants will be treated to one of the world’s most spectacular lobbies – it is adorned with a massive 3D topological map of North America and dozens of big-lettered quotes about the role and importance of the press. But they’ll also find themselves surrounded by several of the most important buildings on earth.
Buildings from around the world in the Tribune Tower
There are some strange bobbles and outcrops as you walk around the Tribune Tower, and it’s only once you start reading what’s written next to them that you start to work out what has gone on.
At one spot, there’s a piece of Abraham Lincoln’s original tomb embedded in the outer wall. It’s next to a chunk of a shrine from Tokyo, and a small marble fragment from the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna in Libya.
Head round the other side, there’s the stone where George Washington landed after crossing the Delaware River in the Revolutionary War, a piece of the Alamo from Texas and a hunk carved out of Trondheim Cathedral in Norway.
How world wonders ended up in the Tribune Tower
Keep going, and you’ll find bits of Edinburgh Castle, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Hamlet’s Castle in Helsingor, Denmark and the Parthenon. And what’s more, they’re all real.
It’s rather surprising that countries around the world didn’t start banning Tribune reporters, as they’re the ones culpable for this rather bizarre haul of additional extras. It seems that they started procuring parts of iconic sites while working abroad, and the souvenir collection morphed into something different once it was decided to add them to the building as trophies.
More recent additions to the Tribune Tower
It’s clear that the not-entirely-authorised snaffling has become something of a tradition. More recent inclusions in the Tribune Tower’s kleptomaniac external decoration include a segment of the Berlin Wall, roof tiles from the Sydney Opera House and some twisted metal bars retrieved from the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York.
As a result, it simultaneously incorporates seemingly every major building in the world, while being absolutely nothing like any of them. Except, of course, the cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen, which, fittingly, is represented with a chunk of buttress wedged into the wall.
The origins of this haul may be ethically questionable, but it makes for both an excellent pub quiz question and a quite remarkable urban treasure hunt.
More Chicago travel
For a brilliant selection of Chicago tours and experiences, take a look at the options on Viator.
Other Chicago articles on Planet Whitley look at kayaking the Chicago River, the city’s gangster heritage and Chicago’s Frank Lloyd-Wright architecture.
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