Look beside you at the most famous survivor of the Great Chicago Fire. This castellated limestone tower was built in 1869 to hide a tall standpipe that steadied the water pressure from the pumping station across the street. Two years later, in October 1871, fire swept north and leveled everything around it, killing roughly 300 people and leaving a third of the city homeless.
The little tower came through scorched but standing, and it became an emblem of Chicago's refusal to stay down. Oscar Wilde, visiting in 1882, dismissed it as a castellated monstrosity with pepper-boxes stuck all over it, but the city kept it anyway. Look across Michigan Avenue to the matching Pumping Station, still in use.
Together they are among the only public buildings in the burned district that predate the fire.