The final and tallest canceled entry in YIMBY’s “Dead by Design” series is the Chicago World Trade Center, a 210-story megatall office tower that was proposed for the current site of 300 N LaSalle Avenue in River North. Led by Stanley Raskow, this 2,500-foot-tall titan on the river (as shown in the model) had seen two previous iterations that were each 200 feet shorter.
The penultimate addition to our Dead by Design series of cancelled Chicago projects is a gargantuan 2011 proposal oriented around the nine-story Old Chicago Post Office. The original post office was a smaller mail terminal designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. Having completed in 1921, the Art Deco structure was expanded in 1932 to bring its total square footage to 2.5 million square feet. While shuttering its mail operations in 1996, the building was inducted into the National Registry of Historic Places in 2001, then would be sold by the city to Bill Davies of International Property Developers in 2009 for $24 million.
As the sixth entry in our Dead by Design series, the Chicago Spire was a proposed 150-story “megatall” skyscraper that was to be located at the mouth of the Chicago River in Streeterville. At 2,000 feet in height, it would have been the tallest building in the United States and the third-tallest building in the world (soon to be fourth with the incoming completion of Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur).
Next in our “Dead by Design” series of cancelled Chicago supertowers, we have a 112-story tower originally planned for 7 S Dearborn Avenue in The Loop. The mixed-use skyscraper would have measured 1,567 feet to its roof, marking what would have been its official height. However, the structure would have also been accompanied by three 433-foot-tall antennas that would have brought its pinnacle height to 2,000 feet, just one foot higher than last week’s Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle.
One of Chicago’s tallest and most notorious cancelled developments is the 125-story Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle, the first in this series to surpass the Willis (Sears) Tower in height. Proposed in 1988 by Lee Miglin and J. Paul Beitler, this superstructure would have risen 1,999 feet at 201 W Madison Street in The Loop. If construction proceeded as planned up until its targeted 1993 completion, the tower would have reigned as world’s tallest building for 17 years leading up to the completion of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa in 2010. It is worth noting however that building’s sheer influence would very likely have altered the race to the top, creating what may have been a very different set of subsequent mega-towers around the world.
