The history of the Willis Tower, nee Sears, reflects the ups and downs of downtown Chicago.
By that standard, the Sears Tower was a success. The 110-story skyscraper at 233 S. 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 2009
Sears Tower emblematized the staggering power of its corporate parent. As the high-rise was going up in the early 1970s, the company had about $9 billion in annual sales revenue. Its Tower was similarly voracious. Sears was founded in 1892 and virtually invented home shopping with a catalog as thick as Chicago’s telephone directory. It enabled rural families to enjoy the same consumer goods as their urban counterparts with access to stores. Sears provided the model that Amazon would later capitalized on, but it wasn’t nimble enough to adapt to the digital age.Three covers, showing different years, of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. From left is 1894, 1927 and 1896.
His successors ignored Cushman’s diagnosis. Perhaps ambitious architects seduced them into thinking of Sears as too big to fail. 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.”
It was tempted to make the move in part by Chicago’s offer of about $25 million in incentives, the Tribune reported, while also noting: “United is drawing fire from aviation experts who question why it would locate its nerve center in a building identified as a potential target of terrorists.”Jan Stephens, a paralegal at Latham & Watkins, in front of the Sears Tower after it was evacuated on Sept. 20, 2001.
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