Your brain has already made the corn joke. Everybody's does. Those two round concrete towers standing in the river are Marina City, the architect was Bertrand Goldberg, and he went to his grave insisting the shape was FLOWER PETALS. Chicago heard him out, considered it carefully, and has called them the corn cobs for sixty years.
Goldberg's office had a standing house rule about it. Anyone who said corn cob in a client meeting bought lunch.
Now the part nobody guesses. This was built by janitors. The money came from the Building Service Employees International Union — janitors, elevator operators, window washers, the people who cleaned the Loop — and they financed it on purpose, as a political act. Downtown Chicago was emptying out. Middle-class families were leaving for the suburbs by the thousand, and the union that maintained the office buildings did the math and realized that a city center with nobody living in it is a city center with nobody to employ them. So the janitors' unio
n bankrolled the tallest apartment towers on the face of the Earth to convince people to stay. It worked. Thirty-five hundred applications came in for nine hundred apartments.
They were the tallest residential buildings in the world when they opened, and the tallest concrete structures of any kind, and the way they went up was strange to watch. The crews used slip-form construction — a ring of fi
