![]() At the Tower, office occupancy rose by about 45% between the first week in February and the first week in March. Two years after leaving downtown offices, employees return to Willis Tower on March 15, 2022. “And in the long run there is some potential upside.” ![]() “There is some tarnish on the diamond now, but it will come back,” Kenneth Szady, an executive with the Trammell Crow realty company, told the Tribune. Trizec Properties inherited Sears’ responsibility for loan payments due MetLife and, unable to make a 2003 installment, gave the keys to the building to the insurance company. Khan was apparently taking a dig at the Loop’s more nondescript buildings, a mold Paul Gapp, the Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, agreed they broke away from by designing a skyscraper “whose exteriors are a bold, vital, and exciting departure from orthodox mediocrity.”Īfter Sears cut its Tower loose, others bought and sold it, even when it teetered on a precipice of bankruptcy. “But we wanted something that wouldn’t be too prismatic.” “Sears probably would have settled for a squatty 50- or 60-story building - something sturdy, efficient and durable,” said Fazlur Khan, the structural engineer who, with architect Bruce Graham, drew plans for the tower. Sears Tower’s architects gave their client a far larger building than the company’s honchos likely envisioned. Perhaps ambitious architects seduced them into thinking of Sears as too big to fail. His successors ignored Cushman’s diagnosis. The company sold Sears Tower and closed stores but couldn’t make a payment on the loan keeping it afloat. By 1991, Walmart’s sales had overtaken Sears’, which went through a long decline before filing for bankruptcy in 2018. But it didn’t ring the corporate cash registers. Sears Tower spurred the redevelopment along the Chicago River’s west banks and in adjoining neighborhoods. “On behalf of the people of Chicago I want to thank Sears for the confidence they are showing in the future in planning and designing the building which will adorn the West Side,” Mayor Richard J. To reach that height required 76,000 tons of steel, 2.5 million cubic feet of concrete, 25,000 miles of plumbing, and 43,000 miles of telephone cable. Its Tower was similarly voracious.Īt 1,451 feet, it was the world’s tallest building and held that distinction for more than two decades. As the high-rise was going up in the early 1970s, the company had about $9 billion in annual sales revenue. Sears Tower emblematized the staggering power of its corporate parent. People watch as construction begins at the site of the future Sears Tower on June 3, 1971, in Chicago. Its data crunchers said that cities build their tallest structures on the eve of their decline. Today the city’s tallest skyscraper faces the same pandemic-related issues as office buildings throughout the Loop as workers continue to work from home, throwing the continuing vitality of downtown Chicago into question.īarclays Bank, a venerable British investment house, once posited skyscrapers as an economic forecaster. The Tower has had multiple owners, and its appeal was at least momentarily diminished in the months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 more than 20 years ago. Wacker Drive was the world’s tallest for more than two decades and remains popularly known by its maiden name, even though it was renamed for a London-based insurance brokerage in 2009īut Sears Roebuck and Co. (William Yates / Chicago Tribune)īy that standard, the Sears Tower was a success. ![]() A worker navigates the Sears Tower as work continues on the building on April 13, 1973.
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