2018

The McGraw-Hill Building was a 16-story, 190-foot-tall (58 m) landmark building in the Near North Side community area of Chicago, Illinois, at 520 N. Michigan Avenue. The facade and its architectural sculpture by Chicago-born artist Gwen Lux were designated a Chicago Landmark on February 7, 1997. The building was demolished in 1998; however, its facade was saved and reinstalled in 2000 on the new Le Méridien Chicago hotel building. The hotel was renamed the Conrad Chicago in 2005. The hotel was again renamed in 2015, becoming The Gwen, for sculptor Gwen Lux, and is part of The Luxury Collection division of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.

InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile is a hotel in Chicago, United States. The hotel currently occupies two multi-story buildings. The historic tower, or "South Tower," is a 471-foot (144 m), 42-story building which was completed in 1929 originally as the home of the Medinah Athletic Club. The new tower, or "North Tower" is a 295-foot (90 m), 26-story addition, completed in 1961 Before the stock market crash of 1929, the United States was experiencing a building boom. One of these projects was the future home of the Medinah Athletic Club in Chicago, commissioned by the Shriners Organization and designed by architect Walter W. Ahlschlager. The Chicago Shriners Club purchased the property at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Illinois Street directly north of the Tribune Tower for $1 million, while $5 million more was spent on building and equipping what was then to be the 42 story Medinah Athletic Club. The plan was for there to be 3500 members, all of whom had to be a Shriner; at the time of the announcement in 1925, 1000 Shriners had taken out founder memberships for the club. The ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the Medinah Athletic Club was held on November 5, 1928, and to commemorate the occasion, a copper time capsule was placed within the cornerstone. The capsule, which currently remains sealed within the hotel’s limestone exterior, contains records of the organization, photographs of members, and a copy of the Chicago Tribune announcing the proposal of the building, as well as coins and other historic data. Construction of the building’s 42 floors and 440 guest rooms was completed in 1929, and its facilities were made available for the exclusive use of the club’s members and guests.

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.