The Wrigley Building Is Iconic, But Its Stories Are Little-Known. A New Book Changes That

The Wrigley Building is one of Chicago’s most iconic buildings, yet most Chicagoans don’t know much about it, even in a city that reveres architecture and the stories behind it. We hear about the contest to design its neighbor the Tribune Tower, or the limestone cliffs that inspired Jeanne Gang’s Aqua just down the Chicago River, or how Marina City helped revitalize downtown with its mixed-use concept. The Wrigley Building is just the pretty white skyscraper with a clock tower that provides a backdrop for wedding photos and sits at one of the most prominent sites in the city.

But there’s much more to it, as the new book The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon reveals. “The building does have an astounding history,” says author Robert Sharoff, who joined with photographer William Zbaren on the artfully designed large-format book. Sharoff initially thought the book would take 18 months to prepare; instead it took four years.

“Somehow this one kept expanding,” says Sharoff, who has written various architectural books with Zbaren, including one on John Vinci, who jumpstarted The Wrigley Building project and wrote the introduction to the book. “I’ve never had a book like this, where every avenue led to another avenue, and we kept finding amazing things.”

So a book that was originally to be about the building’s history and architecture timed roughly to its centennial – the south tower with the clock was completed in 1921 and the north was finished in 1924, with a bridge between upper floors added in 1931 – also became a book about Charles Gerhard Beersman, the little-known architect who designed it; William Wrigley, Jr., the relentlessly promotional founder of the Wrigley Company; Dorothy and Otis Shepard, a husband-and-wife team who designed Wrigley ads and Chicago Cubs materials; the pioneering radio stations that broadcast from the building; the modern art exhibitions that took place there; and even a 1957 B movie in which giant grasshoppers scale the icon.

That last item is the topic of one of several commentaries in the book by Chicago’s former cultural historian, Tim Samuelson. Interspersed in Sharoff’s larger narrative, these include stories about the approximately 375,000 individual pieces of terra cotta that cover the building’s facade and the amusing failure of its clock to accurately keep time in early years.

The clock was the largest and tallest in Chicago when the building was constructed, just as the building itself was the tallest in the city and the beginning of an attempt to develop Michigan Avenue north of the river as a grand boulevard now known as the “Magnificent Mile.” Early photos show it standing alone amongst warehouses and other low buildings.

And that’s how William Wrigley, Jr. liked it. Wrigley was a master advertiser who got into the chewing gum business after offering gum as a premium given away with the sale of baking powder and finding it was more popular than the baking powder or soap he had previously sold. By the early 1920s, his company was one of the top five advertisers in the U.S. Wrigley “was like P.T. Barnum: had no boundaries, no barriers,” says Zbaren.

So an unmissable corporate headquarters was appealing to Wrigley – especially one that had a clock for everyone to look at, an unprecedented amount of electric lighting illuminating its exterior, and a site visible directly up Michigan Avenue from the south, thanks to the street’s slight jog at the river. The site may have been unusually shaped, as a trapezoid tucked into a rectangular street grid, but it allowed the building to have four unique sides that, at the time of its construction, were all highly visible.

What’s not necessarily visible from ground level but is documented in Zbaren’s photographs is the ornamentation that decorates the building all the way to its top. Manufactured by Chicago’s Northwestern Terra Cotta Company, much of it was essentially handmade.

“There’s nothing like it that’s as complicated visually. Times changed after that,” says Zbaren. “Everything on the Wrigley Building – nothing’s out of a catalog. Every tile had to be custom-made. So it’s not a building like today that comes in on a truck and they piece together and weld it up vertically. It’s a work of art. It’s crafted.”

Zbaren argues that the building is successful in part because it resolves and draws your eye upward. Even the color of its terra cotta cladding contributes, purposefully transitioning from pure white to more yellow as it progresses up the building in six subtly different hues.

“The base is very classical, but as you get up higher, it becomes more whimsical, and what you don’t see is rather mystical,” says Zbaren of the ornamentation. “I kind of fell in love with the architect because you knew he had a sense of humor and a sense of play and also elegance. It’s almost like he was talking to me.”

Beersman, who designed the building while working for the architecture firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, hasn’t received much attention, despite being behind both the Wrigley Building and Cleveland’s iconic Terminal Tower; neither building’s Wikipedia pages even mention him. But Sharoff excavated his story and connected with his 92-year-old daughter Diane MacFadyen, to whom the book is dedicated. They spoke by phone and corresponded for three weeks during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. MacFadyen died before Sharoff and Zbaren were able to meet her in person, but her daughter continued to share archival materials with them.

“It’s a very strange thing to know somebody during the last three weeks of their very long life,” says Sharoff. “That almost felt mystical to me.”  

MacFadyen told stories about her father and revealed the influence of the groundbreaking architect Julia Morgan upon him. Morgan’s mentorship of Beersman helps explain in part the Wrigley Building’s Beaux-Arts style and its uniqueness in Chicago. “Strictly speaking, it’s not a Chicago building,” says Sharoff. “Its references aren’t really Chicago. Charles Beersman had been in Chicago literally weeks when he got the assignment to do it.” Sharoff and Zbaren point to Morgan’s Herald Examiner building in Los Angeles, the Ferry Building in Beersman’s native San Francisco, and the Renaissance Giralda Tower in Spain and Chateau de Chambord in France as important influences on the Wrigley Building.

“I think that’s the reason the Chicago architecture community has never quite known what to think of it exactly,” Sharoff says. “It’s the opposite of ‘less is more,’” a famous dictum of the influential Chicago modernist Mies van der Rohe, whom Sharoff and Zbaren have also covered in a book. “There’s so much going on there.”

“There’s so much going on, but as busy as it is, it’s not fussy,” interjects Zbaren. “You respond to it, and that’s what good art is about. You don’t look at something and say, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ You look at it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s incredibly beautiful.’” 

This story initially referred to Charles Beersman's daughter as Diane de Mailly. She was in fact Diane MacFadyen at the time of her death. The story has been updated.