Tribune Tower to join Wrigley Building as not being the same once sold off

Driving north through downtown and over the Chicago River onto that strip of road known as the “Magnificent Mile,” one encounters those two towering structures that create such a grand entrance.



Something will be lost when Wrigley isn't Wrigley and Tribune isn't Tribune

We have the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower. Across the street from each other, for decades they gave the impression to all who entered the area that this was a classic portion of Chicago.

IT MAY WELL be the one point within Chicago (which is barely over 175 years old) that one could mistake for those centuries-old structures that give many cities overseas their sense of wonder and history.

So what does it mean that pretty soon, there’s a good chance that neither structure will serve the purpose for which it was originally built.

The Wrigley Building that served as corporate offices for the Wrigley Co. (chewing gum, and for many years the Chicago Cubs) was sold off in 2011 to the Zeller Realty Group and the founders of Groupon. A plug by Sinatra in "My Kind of Town" wasn't enough to save it.

Now, Tribune Media (the broadcast end of the old Tribune Co.) says it wants to sell off the gothic tower that it commissioned in an international architecture contest and where it has been based since 1925.

NINE DECADES WORTH of being the headquarters of Col. Robert McCormick’s media empire that included the Chicago Tribune, its printing facilities and the studios of WGN – both radio and television (although the latter moved to their Bradley Place studios decades ago).

Moving up along Michigan (Avenue that is) back in the past

Literally, the company says it has hired Eastdil Secured to do studies to figure out just who, if anyone, would be interested in buying the building from the media company.

No word on how quickly anything could happen – although anyone who has been paying attention knows that there has been speculation for decades that the day would come when the Chicago Tribune would no longer operate out of the Tribune Tower.

Considering the newspaper already publishes (as in physically prints the paper) from a massive complex on Chicago Avenue just northwest of the downtown area, perhaps we should wonder why this move didn’t happen much earlier.

BUT WHAT HAPPENS when the Wrigley Building literally has nothing more to do with the Wrigley Co., AND when Tribune Tower becomes just a 36-story, 462-foot-tall building for corporate entities that have a taste for the overly-grandiose when it comes to office space.

Or worse yet, filled up with more retail space so that we won’t be able to distinguish the Tribune Tower from any other storefront along Michigan Avenue.

What becomes of all those stones collected from historic sites around the world? Will they merely make for a more eccentric Gap? You can “remember the Alamo” by seeing the stone while sitting inside a Starbuck’s coffee joint?

And what of those stones that were installed in the building with much fanfare earlier this year – the bricks from the old Comiskey Park and from Wrigley Field following last winter’s outfield renovation?

PERHAPS IT IS best to bring up Comiskey – which has been dead as a ballpark and buried under asphalt for a quarter-century now.

What will it become by 2025?

There are those who will let their sense of sentiment linger on and on about how special that structure was. There will be similar talk about how special Wrigley and Tribune structures were on Michigan Avenue in the old days.

While a younger generation will want to believe that nothing from before their realm of existence could possibly matter. Which is a shame!

Because while I know some deals can take years to complete, I think it will be a shame that the Tribune won’t spent another decade as owners of their own building. You have to admit that a full century there would have been something of significance.

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Comiskey, Wrigley to live on in Tribune, but will Tower last long?

It’s the quirky story of the week; the Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue that has bricks and rocks from various sites around the world is getting two new additions to its façade.

A Wrigley Field brick will soon be across the street from Wrigley Building

Specifically, bricks from Comiskey Park (torn down in 1991) and Wrigley Field (whose outfield seating was rebuilt during the winter) are going to be embedded into the building that the Chicago Tribune always viewed as the castle from which Col. McCormick and his successors ran their news empire.

BASEBALL FANS WILL have no problem viewing those structures as some sort of historic places worthy of inclusion in the tower – which also includes bricks from the dome of St. Peters Cathedral, the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall.

Then again, the Tribune Tower also includes a brick from the structure on Ontario Street where McCormick himself was born. Which I’m sure the colonel thought was the most significant of the roughly 160 bricks and rocks he managed to obtain for the collection.

Which is supposed to emphasize the idea that the gothic structure on Michigan Avenue is just as significant a structure as any of those other places.

For what it’s worth, the new bricks (new by Tribune Tower standards, old by baseball standards) will be installed come Friday. People will now be able to pass by, and there are bound to be a few baseball types who will make a point of checking out the building so they can see a piece of the old park.

Tribune now owns a piece of White Sox ...

ALTHOUGH TO BE honest, the demolition of Comiskey Park a quarter of a century ago was done in a way to maximize the amount of rubble that could be kept for souvenirs.

My point being that there are so many Comiskey Park bricks out there (distinguished from Wrigley bricks in that they’re covered with whitewash) that they’re not particularly rare.

I remember once seeing a pile of them as part of a touring exhibition of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and there are many White Sox fans who managed to snag themselves a brick that they now regard as the equivalent of a holy relic.

Every now and then, I even see a Comiskey brick up for sale!

AS FOR MY own family, there actually is a seat from the original Comiskey Park. Although throughout the years we managed to lose track of who had possession of it, and it may well have been disposed of by one of the family members who isn’t as attuned to baseball as the hard-core fans are.

... just as they once owned the Cubs

Then, there’s the Wrigley brick – which is available because when the outfield structure was reconfigured to accommodate those video boards, the outer walls needed to be rebuilt.

So there are Cubbie bricks to go along with Sox bricks. Baseball fans of all Chicago persuasions will be able to claim relics.

And now the Tribune Tower is regarding them both as a piece of Chicago history.

Will their spirits now linger on ...

ALTHOUGH A PART of me thinks that these bricks are just bricks. The lasting part of having attended ballgames in both structures is the memory of those games – even though many of the “intriguing” moments I have seen were performed by visiting team ballplayers (Reggie Jackson at Comiskey and Vladimir Guerrero at Wrigley hit two of the hardest balls I have ever seen).

Which means these two bricks are now part of the Tribune structure, which may someday soon not have the same meaning it has held for the nearly one century it has been in existence.



... at Tribune Tower as well?

Tribune is now two companies (the broadcast properties and the newspapers) and who is to say how long they will continue to be housed there? Which could make for an interesting predicament.

When the day comes that the structure at 435 N. Michigan Ave. is demolished, will there be eager scavengers picking through the rubble in hopes of finding that Berlin Wall brick? Or a piece of Comiskey?

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State of the Press: Is being dumped by your owner a good thing these days?

I don’t quite know what to make of the newspaper business these days.

How long until it becomes WGN Tower?

On the one hand, so much of the actual content that fills the airwaves of broadcast outlets and the pages of assorted websites continues to originate with the work done by newspaper reporters.

THEN AGAIN, EVERYBODY seems way too eager to dump on those actual publications.

By dump, I mean literally.

The Tribune Co. has made it clear it wants to get into the broadcast business exclusively – and views its newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) as a drag on the company.

To the point where they plan to break off the newspapers into a separate business entity – which they will then try to sell off to someone else in the near future.

WE’RE AT THE point where the Chicago Tribune will now have to pay rent for the office space it has occupied for nine decades at Tribune Tower – which probably should be renamed WGN Tower and thought of as the place where the radio and television interests named for the one-time World’s Greatest Newspaper (even though it never was) are headquartered.

For all I know, the Tribune newspaper interests may wind up some day having to rent space in the Willis Tower. Or maybe they’ll wind up getting office space in the same building on the Chicago River as the Chicago Sun-Times?



Will NW Herald be better sister ...

That would be the ultimate tacky joke!

The point is that the current ownership on Michigan Avenue no longer views the idea of a media entity that controls a major metro newspaper, a television station, a radio station with a signal powerful-enough to reach across the Midwestern U.S., a local cable news outlet and assorted other properties as being worth the hassle.

WE WILL GET to the day when the concept of WGN being both the Tribune’s all-powerful television and radio station that bolstered the newspaper's influence will be an alien concept. Future generations will get the same blank look at the concept just as much as the youth of today don’t get the point of how overwhelming Larry Lujack was in his heyday – and probably think WLS-AM always spewed a batch of political nonsense in between its commercial spots.

... to Joliet newspaper than Chicago Sun-Times was?

The times change, and I suppose we all have to adapt with them. Even if it means becoming something that gets dumped upon. Although the New York Times reported a story that speculated the Tribune Co.’s moves to maintain the broadcast properties may wind up hobbling any chance of the newspaper properties’ long-term survival.

Of course, we can always float down the Chicago River just a few blocks to the Sun-Times situation, where officials in recent days made it official that they’re selling off one of the suburban newspaper properties they acquired in the past couple of decades to strengthen the overall company.

Now, they need whatever cash they can get ahold of.

SO THE HERALD-News newspaper of Joliet goes from being a sister publication of the Sun-Times to being the sister of the Northwest Herald newspaper of Crystal Lake and the Kane County Chronicle of St. Charles. All are owned by the Shaw Media company that will take over Joliet. Although it seems Crain’s Chicago Business deserves credit for breaking this story.

Being dumped on by the Sun-Times may be a good thing here, because the sense was always that the Sun-Times company people were more interested in gutting the suburban properties they acquired to bolster the status of the downtown paper.

Now, the Herald-News may wind up with ownership that will care about it as an individual entity. Although whether they’re in a position to build it back up to a publication that can provide adequate coverage of Will County (the county that had the largest population growth during the past decade) is questionable.

Does remembering 'Superjock" make me old?

Could Sun-Times ownership have hobbled the paper to the point where nobody could rebuild it? We’ll have to wait and see.

THERE COULD BE one negative in this (or a plus for the Tribune, depending on how one wants to perceive it). Sun-Times people have claimed they are now the largest-circulation newspaper entity because they were adding in all the circulation of their suburban properties into one mass – and the total came to a figure barely bigger than the Tribune’s circulation.

Could the loss of the 25,000 or so copies of the Herald-News sold daily be just enough to dump the Sun-Times back into Second Place behind the Tribune?

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