LaSalle Street ends here. Every bank and every trading house up that canyon lines up in two walls of stone, and at the bottom of the corridor the Chicago Board of Trade stands across the whole opening like a cork in a bottle. It was designed to be the thing you see from ten blocks away, and it is.
Now go all the way to the top. That silver figure standing on the peak, above the clock, above everything, is Ceres — the Roman goddess of grain, presiding over a building where people bought and sold grain. She's thirty-one feet tall, cast in aluminum, assembled from forty separate geometric pieces, all hard angles and stylized folds. She holds a sheaf of wheat in one hand and a sack of corn in the other.
And she has no face.
She was made that way deliberately. The sculptor, John Storrs, left her featureless — because at more than forty stories up she was the highest thing in Chicago. He reasoned that no human being would ever be in a position to look at her face. So carving one would be
effort spent on nobody.
He was right for thirty-five years. Then Chicago got taller. The Willis Tower went up a few blocks west, a hundred and ten stories, and today several thousand people a day stand at that observation deck and look DOWN at a goddess who was designed on the assumption that nobody ever would.
Storrs was asked, later, about adding a face. He declined, and pointed out that fixin
