Piece of Antarctica in the Tribune Tower - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 41° 53.476 W 087° 37.393
16T E 448298 N 4637891
This piece of Antarctica is located near the intersection of Illinois St. and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, IL.
Waymark Code: WMBTMJ
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 06/20/2011
Views: 27
The Tribune Tower in Chicago is located at 435 N. Michigan Ave and won an architectural design contest in 1922 out of 260 submissions.
Colonel McCormick, the Chicago Tribune publisher requested that the building have bricks and stones from other important sites around the world built into it's exterior walls. There are now 136 fragments...including a stone from Antarctica. Other sites represented include fragments from the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden Palace, the White House, Bunker Hill, Pearl Harbor, Omaha Beach in Normandy, Fort McHenry. More recently, a piece of metal from the former World Trade Center in New York has been added.
The Antarctica addition has a black piece of rock with the caption:
"ANTARTICA
U.S. NAVY EXPEDITION 1947"
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds the following:
"Stones included in the wall are from such sites as the Trondheim Cathedral, Taj Mahal, Clementine Hall, the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, Corregidor Island, Palace of Westminster, petrified wood from the Redwood National and State Parks, the Great Pyramid, The Alamo, Notre-Dame, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Great Wall of China, Independence Hall, Fort Santiago, the Berlin Wall, Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Banteay Srei among others. Some of these had a political or social context such as the column fragment of Wawel Castle located in its own niche over the upper-left corner of the main entrance, as a visual tribute to Chicago's large Polish populace, the largest such presence outside of the Republic of Poland."