Get close to the base of the Tribune Tower and start reading the little brass labels. Because set into the limestone wall, at hand height, are fragments of other people's buildings. The Parthenon. The Great Wall of China. Westminster Abbey. The Alamo. The Colosseum. The Taj Mahal. A piece of Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield. A chunk of the Berlin Wall. A rock from the battlefield at Little Bighorn. A stone from the White House. A hundred and forty-nine of them, from every continent on Earth, mortared into a newspaper office on Michigan Avenue.
Not one of them was quarried for this building. All of them came off something else.
This was a policy. Colonel Robert McCormick, who owned the Tribune and ran it like a small nation, instructed his foreign correspondents to bring him back a piece of wherever they were posted. So a reporter covering a coronation might also be crouched behind a cathedral with a chisel and a coat pocket. Some of the stones were formally gifted by grateful g
overnments. Some of them absolutely were not, and the paperwork on those is thin to the point of transparent. You can stand on a public sidewalk in the Midwest and put your palm flat on the Great Wall of China, and nobody will stop you, because at this point it's just the wall.
McCormick kept a private ranking of which correspondent brought back the best stone. The man who came home from a full y
