Beginning in 1911, McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson were co-editors
of the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper that grew into a journalistic powerhouse
under the leadership of their grandfather, Joseph Medill. Medill was born
in 1823 and grew up in Ohio; by the time he was 27, he had purchased his
first newspaper. A year after buying the paper in Cleveland, Medill bought
a substantial stake in the Chicago Tribune and moved his family to the city.
Here he rose to become one of the most powerful influences in Chicago, penning
the now-famous editorial in which he stated “Chicago shall rise again” from
the ashes of the great Chicago fire in 1871.
Though Colonel McCormick introduced groundbreaking measures in journalism,
such as being the first newspaper publisher to use color imaging and later
being among the first to start news broadcasts on radio and television, his
vision stretched further.
McCormick wanted to move the Chicago Tribune’s operations from an
office building at the corner of Dearborn and Madison to a permanent home
on Michigan Avenue, just north of the Chicago River. In 1922, the company
announced an international architecture competition for an office tower that
would house the Chicago Tribune and provide space for workers and tenants.
It was to be “the world’s most beautiful office building,” and
to assure all of the seriousness of the competition, the paper offered $100,000
in prizes. In all, 285 designs were submitted from 115 countries. McCormick,
along with a distinguished panel of judges, selected John Mead Howells and
Raymond M. Hood, associate architects of New York, as the first-place winners.
They broke ground on May 23, 1923.
Two years later, on July 6, 1925, the Tribune Tower opened its doors to
the public. The end result was a Gothic tower rising 473 feet and 36 stories
above Michigan Avenue, across the street from another landmark, the Wrigley
Building, which had been completed the previous year. The Tower’s total
cost to build was $8.5 million, exceeding “by 40 cents per cubic foot
the cost of any other skyscraper in the world.”
The Colonel was a proud Chicagoan and fought throughout his career to
improve the city and to make it a safe and beautiful place to live. In
continuing
the McCormick legacy of building for the future, the foundation is proud
to partner in this important project with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture
and IIT. It is the foundation’s hope that the McCormick Tribune Campus
Center not only will meet the needs of IIT students and faculty, but also
will contribute to the revitalization of the city’s South Side.
The McCormick Tribune Foundation is one of the nation’s largest
charitable organizations, with combined assets of more than $2 billion.
In 2002, the
foundation awarded $98 million nationwide, with more than $33 million of
the total going toward 477 Chicago-area charitable agencies and institutions.
By year-end 2003, the foundation expects to achieve a similar level of
funding.
