Embedded History – Tribune Tower, Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, United States

Prior to the building of the Tribune Tower, correspondents for the Chicago Tribune brought back rocks and bricks from a variety of historically important sites throughout the world at the request of Colonel McCormick. Many of these reliefs have been incorporated into the lowest levels of the building and are labeled with their location of origin. Stones included in the wall are from such sites as the St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Trondheim Cathedral, Taj Mahal, Clementine Hall, the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, Corregidor Island, Palace of Westminster, petrified wood from the Redwood National and State Parks, the Great Pyramid, The Alamo, Notre Dame de Paris, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Great Wall of China, Independence Hall, Fort Santiago, Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, Wawel Castle, Banteay Srei, and Rouen Cathedral’s Butter Tower, which inspired the shape of the building.

Some of these had a political or social context such as the stone from the Berlin Wall and the column fragment of Wawel Castle located in its own niche over the upper-left corner of the main entrance, as a visual tribute[citation needed] to Chicago’s large Polish populace, the largest such presence outside of the Republic of Poland. There are 149 fragments in the building. More recently a rock brought from the moon was displayed in a window in the Tribune giftstore (it could not be added to the wall as NASA owns a large majority of the Apollo moon rocks, and this one, within that category, was merely on loan to the Tribune). A piece of steel recovered from the World Trade Center has been added to the wall.