The white one is the Wrigley Building, and the white is doing a job. That skin is more than two hundred and fifty thousand individual pieces of glazed terra cotta, and they are not all the same color. There are six shades of white on that tower, arranged in bands, getting paler the higher you look — so the top reads brighter than the bottom and the whole thing appears lit from inside even when nothing's switched on. It's a trick played with pottery. Crews still wash it by hand to keep the effect working.
And when something IS switched on, it's a hundred and sixteen floodlights firing across the river from the far bank. Wrigley had the tower deliberately illuminated starting in nineteen twenty-one, back when the American night sky was mostly dark and a lit building was an event people rode streetcars to see. He essentially invented the idea that a skyline should be visible after dinner.
Then look up at the clock, which is enormous on purpose. Four faces, each of them nearly twenty fee
t across, so that a person standing on the opposite bank of the river could read the time off a chewing gum company. That's the pitch. You need something — the hour — and to get it you have to look at his building. Wrigley bought your attention with a public service.
The tower's shape is lifted from the Giralda, the bell tower of the cathedral in Seville, and the designer, Charles Beersman, then
