Today’s newspaper column from The Daily Journal (Kankakee, Ill.) and The Times (Ottawa, Ill.) …
Discover just how the Tribune Tower rocks
The WISCH LIST
Dec. 3, 2011
Throughout its 164-year history chronicling the triumphs and failures of the Windy City and beyond, the Chicago Tribune has had its fair share of famous rocky moments.
“Dewey defeats Truman,” for one. The Sam Zell era, for another.
The newspaper, though, also has its fair share of famous rocks that you might not be so familiar with. Yes, rocks.
And this month if you’re in Chicago visiting the Magnificent Mile to see the holiday sights, I suggest swinging by the Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan Ave. to take a rocky ride around the globe via the collection of stones from nearly 150 exotic locales that are embedded in the ground-level exterior of the skyscraper.
It’s quite a trip.
How these stones came to Chicago is a story that begins in the early part of the 20th century, prior to the 1923 construction of the Tribune Tower.
On June 10, 1922, the newspaper hosted an international design competition for its new headquarters and offered $100,000 in prize money with a $50,000 1st prize for “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.” More than 260 entries were received with the winner was a neo-Gothic design by a pair of New York architects.
Around this same time, the Tribune’s colorful publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick ordered his army of correspondents to haul back rocks and bricks from a vast array of historically significant sites from around the world so they could be embedded in the base of the Trib’s new digs.
When I worked at the Tribune from 2005 to 2007, the story was that some of these rocks were taken from their farflung homes without, ahem, proper permission. Regardless of how they were acquired, though, McCormick ended up with a literal mother lode of fascinating stones.
I’ve glanced at groupings of the rocks on many occasions, but on Monday night I returned to the Tribune Tower to take them all in at once. The experience was like opening up both a history book and a map of the world simultaneously.
Among the most recognizable foreign stones in the wall are those from sites such as the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon and the House of Parliament, as well as Germany’s Berlin Wall and China’s Great one.
There’s a rock from Hamlet’s Castle in Denmark and another from Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris donated a stone, as did St. Peter’s in Rome. You’ll also find Peking’s Forbidden City represented, along with the Great Pyramid of Giza and Moscow’s Kremlin.
Domestically, you’ll discover rocks from the Alamo, the original tomb of Abraham Lincoln and Princeton, Harvard and Yale. You can also spy a piece of South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, New York’s Fort Ticonderoga and Maryland’s Fort McHenry.
On one wall, Gen. Custer’s battlefield in Montana and the Battle of New Orleans left parts of their legacies, while on another a pair of Revolutionary War battlefields from New Jersey left theirs.
There are scores of other more obscure, but no less fascinating, rocks to discover, as well one item that’s not a rock at all: a piece of twisted metal from New York’s World Trade Center.
The stone you won’t see, however, is the only otherworldly one. In September, the Tribune returned its lone moon rook to NASA, who had provided it on loan for years.
NASA agreed to send another one, and it’s expected to arrive in the spring. In the meantime, though, you’ll just have to make do with an alternate.
And stare at a piece from the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho, instead.
