Mather Tower

Mather Tower rises as a pencil-thin shaft of white terra cotta above East Wacker Drive. Completed in nineteen twenty-four, this neo-Gothic skyscraper originally housed the offices of a prominent coal tycoon, Alonzo Mather. Engineers squeezed the building onto a tiny, awkward lot, forcing them to use a narrow, wedding-cake design that tapers sharply toward the top. During construction, workers narrowly avoided catastrophe when a massive steel beam slipped from a crane, plummeting all the way to the street level below.