"Chicago - River & Harbour Cruise" Chicago Travelogue by Paulie_D

William Wrigley, Jr., the successful chewing gum manufacturer, in search of an impressive main office for his company, picked the present location of the Wrigley Building in 1920.

The giant two-story clock has four -nineteen and a half feet in diameter clock dials. Each of the dials have an hour hand measuring 6.5 feet and a minute hand equalling 9 feet 2 inches long. The exterior of the structure is a special glazed tile of terra cotta, which gives it a creamy white color.

Information obtained from Visit Chicago Illinois.com

Tribune Tower is familiar to the general public as the home of the Chicago Tribune and was the winning design in an international competition held by the Tribune in 1922.

It is modeled on the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral. The facade is also inset with stones from famous buildings throughout the world.

The simpler structure joined to the tower on the east was built as a separate building, the Tribune Plant, designed by Jarvis Hunt. Its south side was surfaced with stone in 1965.

-- Source: "Chicago's Famous Buildings," ed. by Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington. U. of Chicago Press, 1993

Marina City, built in 1959, is built on only three acres of land in the heart of Chicago's Loop. A dramatic landmark in the Chicago skyline, it culminated thirty years of thought and development for Bertram Goldberg.

Each of the twin, sixty-story towers had four hundred and fifty apartments in its upper two-thirds, with the lower third a continuous parking ramp that spirals upwards, accommodating four hundred and fifty automobiles.

The towers are as popular with Chicagoans as the 'corn on the cob' they are caricatured as in Goldberg's office.

Source : Great Buildings.com

The Sears Tower is 1,454 feet high, 1,808 feet including twin antenna towers. The combined weight of the building is 222,500 tons - 445,000,000 lbs.

The cost of the Sears Tower building was in excess of $150 million. The Sears Tower opened in 1973 and took 3 years to build.

The building has 4.5 million gross square feet of floor space. The average sway of the building is approximately 6 inches from true center.

The Sears Tower has approximately 16,100 bronze-tinted windows and has 6 roof-mounted robotic window washing machines. The Sears Tower was designed for more than 12,000 occupants, approximately 25,000 people enter the building each day and approximately 1.5 million tourists visit the Skydeck each year.

Information obtained from Visit Chicago Illinois.com

For information on visiting, Click Here

For information on visiting, Click Here