Starting with a 50-foot hole, Sears (now Willis) Tower rose to record-breaking height in just 3 years
Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s announcement that it would build the world’s tallest building in downtown Chicago was a psychological shot in the arm for a city suffering from urban disorder and suburban flight.
Construction on the 110-story building on South Wacker Drive began in 1970 and at first went in the opposite direction: the digging of a 50-foot hole for its foundation.
The next year, the nuts were tightened on the first steel beam, and with each additional piece, the Sears Tower slowly became a visible reality. On March 6, 1973, fellow workers cheered when Victor Mugica set a beam that made Sears Tower a few feet taller than New York’s World Trade Center.
Over just four days the following month, however, the structure seemed cursed. Four workers were killed in an elevator shaft fire. A fifth was knocked off a platform on the 109th floor and fell 35 feet to his death.
The work continued, and on May 2, the day before the scheduled topping-out party, the Tribune put New York on notice:
“After tomorrow, when schoolchildren dream of big buildings, they’ll no longer think of you and the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center,” the paper wrote.
Fifty years (and one name change, to the Willis Tower in 2009) later, former Tribune photographer Charles Osgood recalled the ceremony.
“It was the coldest I’ve ever been,” Osgood said.
He had been on the Tribune payroll for just three years, and the assignment proved to be his journalistic bar mitzvah.
A longtime Tribune employee was scheduled to be the pool photographer. It was his images of the setting of the final beam that would be shared with other news outlets. But the veteran photographer, William Yates, begged off. “No, you do it,” Yates said to Osgood. “I’ve shot a thousand of these.”
So that’s how Osgood ended up 1,454 feet above Chicago as the final beam was set in place. The wind chill factor had metamorphosed a relatively balmy day below into a freezing one atop the world’s tallest building.
“My fingers were so cold, I couldn’t press the camera’s shutter button,” he said. “I thought — I’m going to blow this!”
Then the adrenaline kicked in. He punched and punched the button until the shutter clicked. Osgood’s perseverance paid off.
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