Tribune Tower

A competition-winning Gothic statement

Tribune Tower exists because the Chicago Tribune wanted a headquarters that made a statement, and in 1922 it ran an international design competition — over 260 entries from around the world — explicitly to get one. The winning design, by architects Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, is a neo-Gothic tower crowned with flying buttresses, a deliberate throwback at a moment when much of the rest of Chicago's skyline was pushing toward the cleaner lines that would define later skyscraper design. It opened in 1925, and its silhouette — spiky, vertical, unmistakably medieval-inspired — has stood in visual contrast to almost everything built near it ever since.

The building's most distinctive detail has nothing to do with its overall design: embedded in its lower exterior walls are close to 150 fragments gathered from famous sites and landmarks around the world, collected over decades by Tribune correspondents and included at the request of the paper's publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick. Pieces of the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and Westminster Abbey sit alongside a chunk of the moon's surface, each labeled, turning a walk around the building's base into a genuinely unusual scavenger hunt.

The Wrigley Building

Directly across Michigan Avenue — the two towers form the Mag Mile's signature architectural pairing.

The Chicago Riverwalk

A short walk south, along the river Tribune Tower sits just north of.

From newsroom to residences

The Chicago Tribune moved its operations out of the building in the 2010s, and in 2020 the tower was converted into luxury residential condominiums — a fate that's befallen several of Chicago's historic office towers as downtown real estate has shifted, and one that would have been unthinkable to the paper's original publisher. The conversion preserved the exterior and much of the ground-floor lobby, which remains publicly accessible even though the upper floors are now private homes rather than newsroom offices.

For a visitor, that means the experience here is almost entirely at street level: circling the building's base to find and read the embedded stones, taking in the lobby, and photographing the Gothic silhouette against the Wrigley Building's white terra cotta across the street. It's a five-to-fifteen-minute stop by design, easily folded into a Magnificent Mile walk or a Riverwalk visit rather than requiring a dedicated trip of its own.

• The embedded stones are outside, at street level, and free to view any time — no ticket needed.
• The building is now private residences; the lobby remains publicly viewable, upper floors are not.
• Best paired with a Wrigley Building stop directly across the street and a Riverwalk or Mag Mile walk.

Magnificent Mile Shopping

Tribune Tower sits at the southern end of the Mag Mile's shopping stretch.

Streeterville

The neighborhood just east of Tribune Tower, across the river from the Loop.