Notice the gleaming white tower that opens onto the Magnificent Mile. The Wrigley Building rose in 1921 and 1924, paid for by chewing-gum fortune and designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. Its terra-cotta cladding is shaded in six tones of white that grow brighter toward the top, so the tower seems to glow, and at night floodlights make it luminous against the dark river.
Its clock tower borrows from the Giralda of Seville. The building was a gamble: when it opened, this side of the river was still warehouses and grime, but the new Michigan Avenue Bridge had just opened the north bank to development, and the Wrigley Building announced that a grand commercial boulevard was coming. Look across Michigan Avenue to the Gothic spires of Tribune Tower, its rival and companion in defining this stretch of skyline.