Description • Architects: Raymond Hood and John M. Howells, John Vinci.
• Architects won first prize in the design competition, their design based on the design of the Butter Tower at Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, among 263 entries. Several of them in visible influence on future skyscrapers, which 2nd and 3rd-place winners were Eliel Saarinen and Holabird & Roche.
• Stones from famous monuments and sites around the world and from the moon, including the Arc de Triomphe, Parthenon, Berlin Wall, Alamo, Great Wall of China, Forbidden City, White House, Taj Mahal, Great Pyramid of Cheops, Petrified Forest, Badlands, St. Peter's, Notre-Dame, Hagia Sophia, Antarctica, Omaha Beach, and Mammoth Cave contribute for its walls' construction.
• 8 flying buttresses, with sculptures of bats carved into them are on top of higher tower.
• Lobby walls are inscribed with quotations of famous persons, representing the newspaper's ideals. Also has a relief map of North America made of shredded dollar notes and plaster.
• A stone screen is over the doorway, as a reminder of Aesop's Fables lessons, filled with images, which architects Hood & Howells are represented on it by Robin Hood and a "howelling" dog.
• At the top of the tower the offices are linked by secret passageways.
• 25th floor terrace was a public observation deck until the 1950s, not anymore rentable, when the higher observatory in One Prudential Plaza took away much of its business.
• The tower's site was chosen because its proximity to the 1916 old printing plant, still standing on the east side of the tower.
• WGN studio live radio broadcasts, the call letters stand for "World's Greatest Newspaper", are visible through a show window at the southwest corner of the tower's ground floor.
• A lowrise 1935 addition was built on its north, forming a small courtyard with the Nathan Hale statue, Revolutionary War hero.
• When the building opened, the Chicago Tribune relocated here from its previous offices in the First Federal Building, but in 1982, printing part of it was shifted from this building to the Freedom Center on the North Branch of the Chicago River.
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